lTY 

^jaa<^a«ie»aew ij a<M» u i*iMi i iii n iiiMWMWMW w« wi »ifM>iOTniwimHia i fii^^ 



HOMEUNiVERS 





■a w wa B c iagaMBgag w i imn iMM'wb mh i ju hm hi uuu 



rtatkVii.\vmiHHn } m^uiimui4 a tiiiuMiuu»M t iu ii \iihhtnuu n n n imuu u ^lesw ^sy. ■ 




Book 






PRESENTED BY 




HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 

No. 89 

Editors: 

HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 

Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, Litt.D., 
LL.D., F.B.A. 

Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 

Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 



a:HE HOME UNIVEESITY LIBKAEY 
OF MODEK:tT KI^OWLEDGE 

16mo cloth, 50 cents net, postpaid 

LITERATURE AND ART 

Already Published 

SHAKESPEARE By John Masefield 

ENGLISH LITERATURE- 
MODERN By G. H. Mair 

ENGLISH LITERATURE- 
MEDIEVAL By W. P. Ker 

LANDMARKS IN FRENCH 
LITERATURE By G. L. Strachey 

ARCHITECTURE By W. R. Lethaby 

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE . » By L. Pearsall Smith 

WRITING ENGLISH PROSE . . By W. T. Brewster 

GREAT AMERICAN WRITERS . By W. P. Trent and John 

Erskine 

DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE By John Bailey 

THE VICTORIAN AGE IN LIT- 
ERATURE By G. K. Chesterton 

THE LITERATURE OF GER- 
MANY By J. G. Robertson 

PAINTERS AND PAINTING . . By Frederick Wedmore 

SHELLY, GODWIN, AND THEIR 
CIRCLE By H. N. Brailsford 

ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL . By Miss Jane Harrison 

EURIPIDES By Gilbert Murray 

CHAUCER AND HIS TIMES . . By Miss G. E. Hadow 

WILLIAM MORRIS: HIS WORK 

AND INFLUENCE By A. C. Brock 

Future Issues 

ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAIS- 
SANCE By Roger E. Fry 

SCANDINAVIAN HISTORY AND 

LITERATURE By T. C. Snow 

SIR THOMAS MORE AND HIS 

CIRCLE By R. W. Chambers 

HISTORY -AND LITERATURE 

OF SPAIN By J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly 

LATIN LITERATURE By J. S. Phillimore 

LITERARY TASTE By Thomas Seccombe 

GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA . By C. T. Hagberg Wright 

THE RENAISSANCE By Edith Sichel 

MILTON By John Bailey 



ELIZABETHAN 
LITERATURE 



BY 



JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON 

M.P. 

AUTHOR OF <« MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE'* 
«« MODERN HUMANISTS," ETC. 




NEW YORK 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

LONDON 
WILLIAMS AND N ORG ATE 



n I 



r ^ 



"r^ 



CONTENTS 



OHAPTER 

I A bird's-eye view 

II PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 

III POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 

IV SPENSER .... 

V THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 

VI THE GREAT PROSE 

VII POETRY AFTER SPENSER 



VIII SHAKESPEARE 



IX PROSE FICTION 



X THE LATER DRAMATISTS 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 



PAGH 

7 
18 

42 

85 
117 
140 
175 

200 

224 
253 



INDEX 



. 255 



Volumes of kindred interest already published in the Library 

are : 

Chaucer and His Times. By Grace Hadow. 

Shakespeare. By John Masefield. 

English Literature : Mediaeval. By Prof. W. P. Ker„ 

English Literature : Modern. By G. H. Mair. 

Landmarks in French Literature. By G. L. 
Strachey. 

The English Language. By L. Pearsall Smith. 



ELIZABETHAN 
LITERATURE 

CHAPTER I 

A bird's-eye view 

IN following the growth of a literature, we 
find ourselves after a time driven to narrow 
the working definition of the subject-matter. 
For scientific purposes there is indeed no 
ultimate dividing line between what the 
French call " belles lettres " — what used to be 
known in English as " polite letters " — and 
other kinds of writing. Even handbooks of 
" literature " in the academic sense usually 
deal with the writers of history and philo- 
sophy ; and a history of nineteenth-century 
literature could hardly omit Darwin, though 
that great man is not remarkable for his style. 
But as books multiply and their makers 
specialize, the survey of them tends to divide 
between histories of " thought " and histories 
of the kinds of writing which have an aesthetic 
or artistic aim. Even here, the separation is 
an artificial one, a matter of convenience rather 
than of fundamental distinction. We cannot 



8 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

omit to consider the way of thought of the men 
who write plays, poems, and novels ; and even 
if we concern ourselves mainly with the art 
of verbal expression we cannot ignore the de- 
velopment given to that art in scientific or 
didactic treatises. But there emerges for us in 
such a survey a general conception of "litera- 
ture " as one of the fine arts ; a matter of 
putting sincere thought or feeling in fine form ; 
and the term " fine letters " might fitly be used 
to describe it. 

It is to this aspect that any short survey of 
'^ Elizabethan literature " must necessarily be 
addressed. It is of an artistic aspect that we 
think, first and last, when we use the phrase. 
When there began to come over English 
literature the change which broadly marks 
off that of the nineteenth century from that 
of the eighteenth, an eager return to the age of 
Shakespeare was at once a symptom, an effect, 
and a cause of the alteration. The generation 
which in its youth fed upon Wordsworth and 
Keats and Coleridge and Scott found itself, 
as it were, spiritually detached from the age of 
Addison and Pope ; even from the nearer age 
of Gray, Goldsmith, and Johnson. It reached 
out spontaneously to the beautiful free way of 
writing which it saw in Spenser and Shake- 
speare, finding there a kind of delight that 
was not given by the prose and poetry of the 
eighteenth century, which in comparison is so 
straitened and constrained. Keats, who so 



A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 9 

rejoiced in Chapman's translation of Homer, 
sounded the note of revolt against a mode 
of poetry which he (mistakenly) regarded as 
having been imposed upon his race by the 
French influence of Boileau. And that revo- 
lution in taste has in the main been permanent, 
though we can now realize that what happened 
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
was not so much a wilful adoption of French 
models as a development of a kind of literary 
bent which is clearly present in the literature 
of Elizabeth's age. 

fin that literature there are " two spirits." 
From the first, it runs, even in point of style, 
to a precise and pedestrian kind of verse and 
phrase, as well as to a free and beautiful way 
of writing. The Popean couplet, the prosaic 
and didactic way of viewing and describing 
life, the constrained way of singing, are all to 
be found in Tudor prose and verse down to the 
Jacobean period ; and they never disappear. 
Only, there is the broad difference that in 
Elizabeth's later days an inspired kind of 
poetry and a stately and powerful prose 
bulked largely ; whereas in the seventeenth 
century the fettered and formal kind of verse 
gradually got the upper hand, leading up to 
the general acceptance of the somewhat ill- 
named " heroic '' couplet as the best verse- 
form ; and the noble and beautiful way of 
writing prose, though it was even perfected 
by the great writers of the seventeenth cen- 



10 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

tury, at length gave way to a simpler, a more 
colloquial, a less dignified diction. Thus we 
remember the Elizabethan time as that of a 
great blank verse, of the Spenserian stanza, 
of the Shakespearean lyric, and of the 
large " orchestrated " sentence ; whereas we 
broadly conceive of the later " Augustan " 
period as that of the neat and cut sentence, 
the rhymed couplet, and the lyric of short and 
low flight. 

We shall do well, nevertheless, not to make 
up our minds that the whole evolution was a 
downward one, despite our keener pleasure 
in the earlier styles. Those in fact " ran to 
seed," as the phrase goes. Dramatic blank 
verse soon fell from greatness after Shake- 
speare ; even the great epic verse of Milton 
is perhaps more often skilful than inspired ; 
and though Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy 
Taylor remain for us among the great masters 
of prose form and tone, their way of writing 
could not without affectation be persisted in 
for the purposes of Dryden's literary criticism 
(which demanded his own excellent and in- 
dividual prose style), any more than for the 
criticism of life which came naturally to Ad- 
dison and Swift. Every vigorous age must 
write in its own way ; and all sincere and com- 
petent utterance makes for good writing of 
some kind. We can but say that in moving 
away from the Elizabethan modes English 
literature lost something of charm and splen- 



A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 11 

dour ; and that to return to these is one of the 
choice pleasures of the Enghsh-reading world^f. 

Much more markedly than in the case of 
most period-divisions, " Elizabethan " litera- 
ture divides naturally and internally according 
to the historic label, at least as regards its 
rise. Every labelled period, of course, is 
found to dovetail into its antecedent ; and 
the first printed poetry current under Eliza- 
beth was mostly written in her father's reign. 
But between 1530 and 1580 there is none the 
less a difference as between two eras^ Be- 
tween the poetry of Hawes, Barclay, and 
Skelton, and the poetry of Wyatt, Surrey, 
Sackville, and Spenser ; between the prose of 
Elyot and Lord Berners and the prose of 
Bacon and Hooker ; between the dramatic 
interludes of Cornish and John Heywood and 
the drama of Marlowe, Jonson, and Shake- 
speare, there is a far more marked leap in 
development than can be noted in any 
previous period of three generations since 
Chaucer. There has been at once an epochal 
change in verse form, a swift ascent from the 
Middle Ages to the topmost height of the 
Renaissance in dramatic aim and achievement, 
and a no less marvellous rise in prose diction 
and doctrine from an old-world naivete, half- 
scholastic, half-rustic, to a deeply reflective 
and wholly civilized way of writing and 
ratiocination. 

Elizabeth's age sets in with an almost en- 



12 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

tirely new kind of verse. Under Henry VIII, 
Stephen Hawes, in the Pastime of Pleasure, 
and Barclay, in his free rendering of the Ger- 
man-Swiss Sebastian Brandt's Ship of Fools, 
use a stanza which cannot be regularly scanned 
either by accent or by syllables. Only in so- 
called ballad forms of verse, of v/hich the Nut- 
Brown Maid remains the most finished ex- 
ample, is the poetry of that time regularly 
metrical ; the average stanza verse, following 
the wavering example of Lydgate, has lost the 
syllabic precision in which Hoccleve still fol- 
lowed their elder contemporary Chaucer ; 
and even when read accentually yields no 
standardized rhythm. There seems to be a 
positive reversion towards primitive laxity 
of technique. But in the days of Edward 
and Mary there was at work a new leaven, 
though its fruits were not to become the com- 
mon possession till the early days of Eliza- 
beth. In 1557 appears the famous TotteVs 
Miscellany of Songs and Sonnets, largely made 
up of miscellaneous verse by the elder Sir 
Thomas Wyatt (d. 1542) and Henry Howard, 
Earl of Surrey (beheaded 1547) ; and here we 
have together a verse that is vernacular in 
form and substance, and a verse that, for 
book-readers, is new alike in form and theme. 
The vernacular verse is mainly in the 
skipping or " jigging " iambic metre known as 
the '* fourteener," a form thus far incompa- 
tible with either elevation or intensity of 



A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 13 

feeling, but lending itself readily to primitive 
fun, and on that account long to be employed 
in certain kinds of popular play. Only a 
radical variation of its iambic movement could 
raise it to beauty or distinction ; and that 
was not to come till similar evolution had 
occurred in other verse forms. The new verse 
is clearly motived by and modelled on Italian 
and French example ; the former revealing 
itself in Wyatt's free — indeed loose — use of 
accentually scanned lines, and in the moraliz- 
ing pieces in which he anticipates the aca- 
demic, didacticism of a later age. 

But perhaps the most notable innovation 
of all is the introduction of the personal love- 
poem, the brief subjective utterance which is 
the prelude to the Elizabethan sonnet. Here 
poetry, even if by way of imitating foreign 
models, is becoming newly sincere and newly 
arresting, in its resort to the most universal 
of all emotional and artistic motives. The 
first aristocratic poets have anticipated the 
precept of a later and more famous member 
of the tribe : they have looked in their own 
hearts for their themes, even if they are 
copying the French and the Italians. Chaucer, 
truly, had produced in Troilus and Criseyde 
a moving and tender narrative of ill-fated 
love, besides otherwise proving himself a true 
poet in his treatment of the love-interest ; 
and in Hawes's Pastime of Pleasure there are 
clear forecasts of the delicacy and intensity of 



14 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

passion which flames out in Romeo and Juliet, 
and which specially marks the poetry of the 
nineteenth century. But Hawes is still tied 
to the medieval machinery of dream and 
allegory ; and his " Bell Pucell " is most of 
the time a tapestry figure in an old allegoric 
romance of dragons and giants, the living 
human touches being apparently results of a 
late manipulation which has confused the 
story by contradictions in the narrative. 
In the short love-poems of Wyatt and Surrey 
the poet directly addresses the loved one, 
cruel or kind, false or true, employing the 
natural lyric mode of the troubadours, but 
with a personal spontaneity which rejects 
their conventions and breathes of genuine 
feeling. 

Poetry has here ceased to be book-making ; 
and the lyrical supersedes the didactic motive. 
Hawes, with emulous sympathy, speaks of his 
exemplar Lydgate as " making great books 
to live in memory " ; but he had not learned 
that one true song may outlive a library 
of didactically schemed compositions. Upon 
that innovating stir of poetic impulse there 
followed, within a quarter of a century, a far 
greater and more enduring artistic florescence, 
also stimulated by foreign example, but 
deeply rooted too in vernacular art — the large 
output of the eager and fertile muse of Spenser. 
Here it is that Elizabethan narrative and lyric 
poetry reaches the height of its power and 



A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 15 

luxuriance, reaching out a magistral hand to 
Milton in the next age, and making possible 
his epic by demonstrating the poetic wealth 
of the living tongue. For the first time since 
Chaucer, England had a poet of the first rank 
capable of inspiring a whole tribe by his 
example. English rhymed verse was now 
once for all placed upon its modern basis of 
regular metres or rhythms ; and between 
Spenser's stanza and his varied rhyming 
measures on the one hand, and on the other 
the blank verse of the drama as finally estab- 
lished by the triumph of Marlowe and per- 
fected by Shakespeare, the foundations of 
modern English poetry were completely laid 
within the space of a few years. 

In drama the Elizabethan innovation is the 
most marked of all. At the beginning of the 
reign it is still in part lingering at the stage of 
the old interlude ; and such performances as 
the Marian Respublica and Wealth and Health, 
and the Elizabethan Impatient Poverty and 
John the Evangelist, are very much on a par 
with the old morality-play Mankind, and 
Henry Med wall's Nature, both belonging to 
the reign of Henry VII. What we call the 
" Elizabethan drama " might be separated by 
a whole age from the interlude. Influenced 
of course by classic models and by Italian 
and Spanish romance themes, it is a markedly 
English product, specially evoked by social 
and economic conditions peculiar to Eliza- 



16 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

bethan England. We shall see that it was 
an outcome of a mode of economic and social 
freedom that was not allowed to subsist in 
other countries in that period, and is in that 
respect to be causally connected with the 
Reformation, wherein the most zealous pro- 
moters of Protestantism could see nothing 
but incompatibility with the world of the 
theatre. 

But if the Elizabethan drama is a new birth 
alike as to form and content, no less does 
Elizabethan prose tell of a rapid development 
of mental life. The intellectual space be- 
tween Elyot and Hooker, even between Ascham 
and Bacon, suggests an interval rather of cen- 
turies than of one or two generations, alike in 
point of elaboration in thought and of refine- 
ment in style. Sir Thomas More indeed had 
thrown out in his youth, under Henry VIII, 
a work in Latin, the Utopia, which is quite 
abreast of any Elizabethan book in the keen- 
ness and originality of its criticism of life ; but 
Bacon's performance tells of a far richer in- 
tellectual soil, as it were, than that out of 
which grew the lonely pine of his great pre- 
decessor. Above all, his partial resort to 
English, albeit with strange individual mis- 
givings, where More had used Latin, tells of 
more than the earlier writer's social prudence. 
In the course of the lives of the father 
and daughter, Henry and Elizabeth, English 
literature passed from the archaic to the 



A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW 17 

modern, and English life from the medieval 
to the ripe Renaissance. 

The evolution, it need hardly be said, 
affected every side of life. Politically, the 
nation had come within sight of constitu- 
tionalism, though an age of tempests was 
to pass before the new principle was safely 
established. In religion, it had completed 
the breach with the Catholic Church, and 
entered on an era of religious strifes of a new 
kind. Still in the main illiterate, the com- 
mon people had now reached sources of 
culture in the drama, and in sermons aiming 
at instruction ; and the tendency towards 
literacy was continuous. Perhaps partly by 
reason of the breach with Rome, England was 
still without native pictorial art or sculpture : 
but music to some extent went hand-in-hand 
with poetry ; and architecture was markedly 
stimulated by continental example. Socially, 
old soil had been in large measure broken up 
by economic changes ; and industry and com- 
merce had begun to have new outlooks. In 
physics, William Gilbert, who died in the same 
year with Elizabeth, had at the age of sixty 
laid the foundations of a new science in his 
De Magnate ; in his Latin, Elizabethans could 
already read of " electricity " and " electric 
force " ; and in 1603 William Harvey settled 
in London as a physician, to lay in his turn 
new foundations of knowledge. And Thomas 
Harriott, who had played geographer to 

2 



18 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Raleigh's second expedition to Virginia, was 
in the same period to effect important advances 
in algebra,* and, it would seem, silently to 
rival Galileo in discovering the fact of sun- 
spots. 

Science, however, was only a promise when 
Elizabeth passed away ; and hers, accord- 
ingly, is to be remembered as a pre-scientific 
age, in which her wisest counsellor was capable 
of imploring an English alchemist in foreign 
parts to turn his reputed discovery of the 
philosopher's stone to his sovereign's pecu- 
niary benefit. Literature was all the freer 
for the lack of exact knowledge ; and it is 
an eminently free intellectual growth that we 
have now to consider. 



CHAPTER II 

PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 

In watching the progress of English prose 
in the sixteenth century we are made to note, 
among other things, how it is that nations 
get their literature. At that stage one of the 
main incentives to modern writing, the hope 
of gain, hardly came into play, save as re- 
garded poets who counted on reward from 

* It is worth noting that one Englishman, Robert 
Recorde (1557), invented the algebraic sign for 
equality (=), and Harriott those for "greater than " 
and " less than " (>, <). 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 19 

patrons ; and one of the most general modern 
motives to reading, interest in fiction, was 
but little catered for. Caxton in the fifteenth 
century, and Wynkyn de Worde early in the 
sixteenth, printed a number of translations 
or adaptations of French historic romances ; 
but the greatest, Malory's Morte D^Arthur, 
was only twice reprinted between 1485 and 
1529 ; there was no original native fiction ; 
and the whole stock in circulation was small. 
In the light of modern experience, it would 
seem to follow that the reading class was also 
small. Illiteracy, indeed, was rather the rule 
than the exception about 1500 ; the move- 
ment of popular culture set up by the old 
Lollard schools having died out in the Wars 
of the Roses. According to the reformer 
Tyndale, even Latin scholarship had fallen 
very low before the reign of Henry VII ; and 
an independent English prose literature hardly 
existed. The remarkable work of Bishop 
Pecock, The Repressor of Overmuch Blaming 
of the Clergy, written about 1456, had never 
been printed ; and no English treatise of 
equal intellectual reach had been produced. 
Indeed, the English of Pecock and of Sir John 
Fortescue would have been found obsolete in 
large part at the time of the Reformation, 
the first in respect of his old English, the latter 
in respect of his Gallicisms. And the old 
romances, with all their quiet charm, had 
become partly archaic. 



20 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

A Renaissance visibly begins in England 
with the reign of Henry VIII. Ten years 
before, Colet and Erasmus were teaching 
together at Oxford ; and for the scholars the 
accession of the young King was the promise 
of a new and better age. Politically, the hope 
was ill fulfilled : there are few more tragical 
contrasts in the history of culture than that 
between the large vision and forecast of Sir 
Thomas More's youthful Utopia, and the 
struggle and mental constriction of his later 
life. But between the stimulus set up by 
the spreading knowledge of the new world 
opened up by Columbus — a stimulus seen at 
work in the Utopia itself — and that of the new 
impulsion set up by Luther, there set in a mani- 
fold change which perceptibly begins the transi- 
tion from the medieval to the modern period. 
And the transformation takes place in lan- 
guage and literature no less than in polity. 

In recent reigns, prose had been mainly a 
matter of translations from the French : now 
there supervened for Englishmen matters of 
debate in which they had to write and think 
for themselves. The English which was to be 
written by Bacon can be seen growing up in 
the hands of the Protestant Reformers, who 
are typified by Tyndale, the translator of 
the New Testament. They had, in fact, the 
strongest motive to the writing of readable 
prose, the desire to make converts and refute 
opponents. In Greek literature, such a mo- 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 21 

tive had developed the prose of Plato ; in 
Latin that of Cicero ; and in Tudor England, 
with a less lasting matter to debate, it made 
in the due degree for progress. If we contrast 
Tyndale's controversy with Sir Thomas More, 
or his translation of the Enchiridion of Eras- 
mus, with the Boke of the Governour by Sir 
Thomas Elyot (1531), we at once realize that 
the theologian is the more modern writer of the 
two. Equally grounded with the other in 
Latin, he is at once more idiomatic and more 
nimble in his diction, and he is to-day the 
more easily read ; though Elyot' s book has 
the more lasting historical interest. Such 
a sentence as this : 

Although Philosophers in the description of virtues 
have devised to set them as it were in degrees, having 
respect to the quality of the person which is with them 
adorned ; as applying Magnificence to the substance 
and estate of princes, and to private persons Benefi- 
cence and Liberality, yet be not these in any part 
defalcate of their condign praises — 

even when put, as here, in modern spelling, 
is scholastically archaic in comparison with 
the writings of Tyndale, Coverdale, Hooper, 
and Hutchinson. Elyot wrote, indeed, for 
the nobility, his aim being to train "gover- 
nours " ; and, following well-established lines, 
he treats of schooling, archery, dancing, horse- 
manship, and all the public and private 
virtues, with the same dignified zeal and 
stately elocution. His book, too, was re- 



22 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

printed nine times within the century, a con- 
tinuance of vogue not in store for Tyndale. 
But English prose, nevertheless, was shaped 
rather by those who wrote for the commons, 
among whom the readers were in large part 
biased to religious disputation. Controversy 
can be made at least as dull as any other 
reading ; but success in controversy is at 
all events incompatible with dulness for those 
who read ; and in the long-drawn warfare 
between Catholics and Protestants, English 
prose acquired an elasticity and vigour that 
put it for the time, in those respects, ahead 
of the contemporary poetry. Sir Thomas 
More, whose History of the Reign of Henry the 
Seventh is written in a nervous prose much 
more modern in spirit than that of some later 
chroniclers, did some of his most readable 
prose in his acrid controversy with Tyndale ; 
and Tyndale learned something of literary 
technique in crossing swords with so accom- 
plished an adversary. The technique thus 
acquired was naturally turned to the purposes 
of constructive religious writing. Sermon- 
making, from the vernacular and idiomatic 
directness of Latimer to the careful composi- 
tion of Archbishop Sandys, played its part 
in the evolution of literary form. But that 
species of composition in turn was still subject 
to limitations of time and thought which 
excluded it from the rank of great literature. 
Lasting charm was to be reached only when 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 23 

men with a genius for style took up enduring 
themes on which they had thought and felt 
deeply, or on which their sheer faculty of 
utterance could expatiate with a joyous free- 
dom. Only thus can craftsmanship become 
fine art. 

Prose, much more obviously than poetry, 
must always have one foot in utility ; and 
primarily it tends to plant both there. It is 
the last of the fine arts of which it could be 
suggested that it is to be cultivated " for its 
own sake." Even those arts, indeed, con- 
cerning which that claim is most often made — 
music and painting — require some ground 
either of subject or of conscious emotional 
purpose to give them vitality. A picture 
must represent something, to be more than a 
mere arrangement of colours ; and music, to 
be organic, needs some continuity of mood in 
the composer. But all of the arts have more 
immediately to do with the quest of beauty 
than has the art of prose ; and in an age in 
which even poetry was commonly vindicated 
as a means of promoting virtue, prose was 
not readily regarded as an artistic exercise. 
There is little fine English prose before the 
sixteenth century. Such work as Chaucer's 
translation of Boethius, and the discourses 
of the earnest mystic Richard Rolle of Ham- 
pole, perhaps represent best in the previous 
ages the possibilities of prose harmony. But 
as art in some small degree must enter into 



24 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

every process of intellectual construction, the 
concern for charm, so manifest in much 
medieval Latin, could not be for ever excluded 
from prose diction ; and it is already manifest 
in at least one chronicler of the age of 
Henry VIII. 

Roger Ascham, in his Scholemaster, pub- 
lished in his old age (1576), girds sharply 
at the " indenture English," " strange and 
inkhorn terms," " words heaped one upon 
another," and " many sentences of one mean- 
ing clouted up together," in the prose of the 
chronicler Edward Hall ; and it cannot be 
denied that the criticismlias foundation. But 
it ignores the finer qualities of Hall's writing. 
Ascham had very little sense of literary beauty. 
His ov/n verse, in the Scholemaster, is exe- 
crable, and his prose never concerns itself with 
any finer art than that of clear statement ; 
save where he develops the trick of anti- 
thetic clauses which was to become an afflic- 
tion in the hands of John Lilly soon after- 
wards. This fashion made for form as against 
formlessness, but it soon becomes more irritat- 
ing than even tautology. Hall had the sense 
of beauty which Ascham lacked ; and his 
prose, if mannered and laboured, is sometimes 
nobly harmonious. A good example of his 
statelier manner occurs in his account of the 
end of Henry VI : 

The dead corpse of King Henry, with bills and 
glaives pompously (if you call that a funeral pomp), 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 25 

was conveyed from the Tower to the church of Saint 
Paul, and there laid on a bier, where it lay the space 
of an whole day ; and the next day, without priests 
or clerk, torch or taper, singing or saying, it was 
conveyed to the monastery of Chertsey, being distant 
from London XV mile, and there was buried, but 
after he was removed to Windsor, and there in a new 
vault newly intumilate. . . . 

King Henry was of stature goodly, of body slender, 
to which proportion all other members were corre- 
spondent : his face beautiful, in the which continually 
was resident the bounty of mind with which he was 
inwardly endued. He did abhor of his own nature 
all the vices as well of the body as of the soul, and 
from his very infancy he was of honest conversation 
and pure integrity, no brewer of evil, and a keeper 
of all goodness, a despiser of all things which were 
wont to cause the minds of mortal men to slide or 
appair [= worsen]. Beside this, patience was so 
radicate in his heart, that of all the injuries to him 
committed (which were no small number) he never 
asked vengeance nor punishment. . . . 

By reason whereof, Iving Henry the seventh, not 
without cause, sued to July [Julius] Bishop of Rome 
to have him canonized, as other saints be ; but the 
fees of canonizing of a Idng were of so great a quantity 
at Rome (more than the canonizing of a Bishop or 
a prelate, although he sat in Saint Peter's chair) that 
the said Eang thought it more necessary to keep his 
money at home, for the profit of his realm and country, 
rather than to impover'sh his kingdom for the gaining 
of a new holy day of Saint Henry : remitting to God 
the judgment of his will and intent. . . . 

Hall abounds in quaint descriptions of 
persons, and his pages are at times lit up by 
vivid portraits, such as that of Lady Eliza^ 
beth Grey, "a woman more of formal coun- 



26 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

tenance than of excellent beauty," but capable 
of " sober demeanour, lovely looking, and 
feminine smiling," and that of the unfortunate 
Jane Shore, who — by help of the narrative of 
Sir Thomas More — receives more attention 
than any of her betters. But Hall remains 
under the spell of rhetoric, and loves to open 
a chapter in this wise : 

When King Henry had not only obtained this 
triumphant battle at the plain of Bosworth against 
his malicious enemy King Richard, but also by 
glorious victory gat the diadem and possession of the 
estate royal and princely pre-eminence of this famous 
empire and renowned kingdom, he having both the 
ingenious forecast of the subtle serpent and also 
fearing the burning fire like an infant that is a Httle 
singed with a small flame ; and further vigilantly 
foreseeing and prudently providing for doubts that 
might accidentally ensue, devised, studied, and 
compassed to extirpate and eradicate all interior 
seditions and apparent presumptions which might 
move any tumultuous rout or seditious conjuration 
against him within his realm in time to come. 

The models for this sonorous and colorate 
style were to be found in Latin, the only re- 
fined prose with which English scholars were 
yet familiar ; indeed, for the reign of Henry 
VII, Hall does little more than translate 
Polydore Vergil, the standard authority. 
But he is relatively much more ponderous 
than Polydore, as he is less alive than More ; 
and what was too ornate and prolix for a 
scholar like Ascham could not well become a 
popular art. To make a true native prose 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 27 

there were needed other motives than the 
love of stateHness and sonority ; and to 
supply it there were needed other exercises 
than historical narrative. And the required 
influences were in large measure supplied by 
what was for half a century in England the 
chief theme for prose writing and reading — 
theological controversy. From that not very 
promising quarter came an amount of in- 
tellectual and literary stimulus which has not 
been fully recognized. In England, as in Ger- 
many, the Reformation controversy gave a 
new abundance of employment to printers, 
who in turn naturally favoured the Protes- 
tantism that gave them work ; and the 
multiplication of printers and printing-presses 
was a new invitation to literary activity, which 
it facilitated. In Italy, indeed, there was an 
abundant literature before and apart from 
theological controversy ; but in Germany 
and England the Reformation was the gate- 
way to letters for the mass of the people. In 
the latter days of Elizabeth, readers and 
printers must have multiplied to fully thrice 
the number that existed under Henry VIII. 
The same interest, turned to the purposes 
of narrative, elicited the vast work of Fox, 
The Acts and Monuments of the Martyrs, 
Swelled by controversial purpose into a his- 
torico-controversial survey of all ecclesiastical 
history, this compilation (1563-70) not only 
won wide popularity in its own day, but re- 



28 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

mained one of the most familiar of Eliza- 
bethan prose books down till the nineteenth 
century. Here we have an abundant and 
scholarly vocabulary (Fox avowedly would 
have preferred to write in Latin, as he had 
done in his earlier editions), handled, how- 
ever, with a business-like concern for edifica- 
tion rather than with an eye to literary charm ; 
so that the effect is one of a general alacrity 
of movement. Not very trustworthy as 
history, the book is good English. Ascham 
could have found no fault with it, shunning 
as it did the faults of Hall. And yet another 
serious interest, at work before the advent 
of Elizabeth, and widely expanded in her 
time, served to quicken diction, even as it 
did to attract readers. In the writings and 
translations of Richard Eden, the cosmo- 
grapher, of which his treatise Of the Newe 
India (1553) is the first, we realize the virtue 
of precise narrative as a determinant of prose 
form. In his prefaces, writing at large, Eden 
is ill-girt and voluble, his style running to 
shapeless sentences and loose constructions. 
In his narrative, following or translating 
foreign testimonies, he is concise, plain, and 
perspicuous, yet with a breadth of phrase 
that at times attains to poetry, and yields a 
foretaste of that stately and felicitous diction 
which we rank par excellence as Elizabethan. 
It has for us that benefit of remoteness which 
is the special charm of long bygone art ; but 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 29 

also that of diction still unhackneyed. For 
instance : 

But let us entreat somewhat of the particulars of 
the regions. In the province of Caizcima, within the 
great gulf of the beginning, there is a great cave in a 
hollow rock under the root of a high mountain, about 
two furlongs from the sea. The entery of this cave 
is not much unlike the doors of a great temple, being 
very large and turning many w;ays. Andreas Moralis 
the shipmaster, at the commandment of the governor, 
tempted to search the cave with the smallest vessels. 
He saith that by certain privy ways many rivers have 
concourse to this cave as it were to a sink or channel. 
After the experience hereof, they ceased to marvel 
whither other rivers ran, which coming fourscore and 
ten miles were swallowed up, so that they appeared 
no more, nor yet fell into the sea by any knowen ways. 
Now therefore they suppose that rivers swallowed 
up by the stony places of that mountain fall into this 
cave. As the shipmaster entered into the cave his 
ship was almost swallowed. For he saith that there 
are many whirlpools or risings or boilings of the 
water, which make a violent conflict and horrible 
roaring, one encountering the other. Also many huge 
holes and hollow places. So that what on the one 
side with the whirlpools, and on the other side with 
the boiUng of the water, his ship was long in manner 
tossed up and down hke a ball. It greatly repented 
him that he had entered, yet knew he no way how to 
come forth. He now wandered in the darkness, as 
well for the obscureness of the cave into the which 
he was far entered, as also in that in it were thick 
clouds engendered of the moist vapours proceeding of 
the conflict of the waters which with great violence 
fall into the cave on every side. He compareth the 
noise of these waters to the fall of the famous river 
of Nilus from the mountains of Ethyope. They were 
all so deaf that one could not hear what another said. 



30 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

But at the length with great danger and fear he came 
forth of the cave as it had been out of hell. 

Thus does he tell of the wonders of the 
golden tree ; of which the root " extendeth to 
the centre of the earth and there taketh 
nourishment of increase " ; of the marvellous 
great fish Matum, who is " slow of moving, of 
condition meek, gentle, associable, and lov- 
ing to mankind, and of a marvellous sense of 
memorie, as are the elephant or the delphin " ; 
and of the city of Tyrma in the Fortunate 
Isles, "builded upon a high rock, from the 
which many were wont with joyful minds 
and songs to cast themselves down headlong, 
being persuaded by their priests that the 
souls of all such as so died for the love of 
Tyrma should thereby enjoy eternal felicity." 
There is nothing quite so fairylandish in 
Hakluyt's Voyages. 

Thus out of living interests there grew a 
living prose ; and the nation got its books 
through the zealous service of men otherwise 
provided for, well or ill, than by any profit 
the sales could bring them. Despite con- 
fiscations of ancient endowments in the 
political scramble of the Reformation, educa- 
tion went forward ; and though the succes- 
sive translations of the Bible were not at all 
so eagerly bought up as the later tradition 
has it, their authoritative circulation went 
for much in spreading the habit of reading, 
so necessary to the building up of a Protestant 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 31 

public opinion. Above all, the Bible was the 
most generally interesting volume then in 
existence. Here was a whole manifold litera- 
ture, at once sacrosanct and attractive, ren- 
dered in a style which was for the most part 
dignified, simple, and harmonious. For the 
Authorized Version is but one of a series of 
revisions dating from the reign of Henry VIII. 
Its language and its cadences are those of 
the sixteenth century, modelled, however, 
partly on those of the Vulgate, and touched 
above all with a certain heightening strange- 
ness of phrase through the felt necessity of 
translating Hebrew idiom with a strict fidelity 
which was not sought for in versions of the 
pagan classics. As a translation, it belongs 
essentially to the Tudor century. The Great 
Bible of 1539, a result of the work of Tyndale 
and Rogers, revised by Coverdale, is cor- 
rected and refined upon by the Geneva ver- 
sion of 1560, as that is in turn by the Bishops' 
Bible of 1569. The Authorized Version (1611) 
does but select from and in general rec- 
tify their renderings, frequently, though not 
always, improving their phrase, but always 
observing their style. Its literary merit, as 
English prose, is thus corporate. 

What the translation did for English writ- 
ing was, substantially, to check the tendency 
to formlessness in sentence-making, by giving 
authoritative status to a method of short 
clauses, simply balanced. But prose style 



32 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

could not without loss be restricted to that 
method. Style, like matter, to be sound 
must be sincere ; and sincere prose must 
always grow out of normal speech, raising 
it indeed to a higher power and order, but 
listening always to its instincts. Only thus 
can style be saved from convention, the 
" common moth " of literature as of all the 
arts. But it has been strangely difficult for 
both prose and verse to escape that disease. 
Only the masters can combine spontaneity 
with pregnancy and with beauty of form. 
We have cause to be thankful if we get even 
the first two without the third, the search for 
which so often means the loss of the others. 
And various forms of ultimately repellent 
convention had a long lease of fashion in the 
sixteenth century. 

A book published in Elyot's day reveals 
the persistence of a special taste for artificial 
form among the upper classes. In 1534, Lord 
Berners produced, under the title of The 
Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, a transla- 
tion of the French version of the Libro Aureo 
del emperador Marco Aurelio of the Spanish 
ecclesiastic Guevara, in an English even less 
idiomatic than that of Elyot, the construc- 
tions being often purely French or Latinist. 
Following a highly mannered model, Berners, 
who had for years been governor of Calais, 
is much less natural than in his versions of 
Huon of Bordeaux and of Froissarfs Chronicle. 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 33 

The book itself, modish, falsetto, plati- 
tudinous, is to-dajr almost unreadable. Yet 
that too went into some thirteen editions : 
and when the diction of Lord Berners had 
become too old-fashioned. Sir Thomas North, 
who was later to translate Plutarch'^s Lives 
from the French version of Amyot, produced 
a fresh rendering from the French of the 
expanded version of the original work of 
Guevara under its sub-title. The Dial of 
Princes, which in turn went into many re- 
prints. The thin sententiousness of Guevara 
had an apparently irresistible attraction for 
upper-class England in that age, as indeed it 
had for Europe in general. It is stated by 
Casaubon that almost no book save the Bible 
was so often translated and reprinted ; and 
we shall find his influence strongly at work 
down till the nineties. The explanation 
would seem to be that his artificial and minc- 
ing style, which made constant play with the 
rhetorical device of antithesis, and strove 
uneasily after Latin effects of epigram, gave 
a kind of pleasure which in its nature was 
artistic, though the art was cheap and the 
taste pleased by it inevitably crude. Men 
and women read by the yard this sort of thing 
in Guevara : 

For there is nothing so hard but it is made soft ; 
nor kept so close, but it may be seen ; nor so subtile, 
but it may be felt ; nor so dark, but it may be 
lighted ; nor so profound, but it may be discovered ; 

3 



84 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

nor so dissevered, but it may be gathered together ; 
nor so lost, but it may be found ; nor so impossible, 
but it may be conserved, if with all our hearts we 
occupy our powers in good exercises, and apply our 
understanding in high things. Right dear lord, I 
demand of you, what profit is it to the mariner to 
know the card of the sea, and after to perish in a 
torment or tempest ? What profit is it to a captain 
to speak much of war, and after not know how to give 
battle ? What profiteth it to a knight to have a good 
horse and to fall in the street ? What profiteth it 
to one to teach another the plain way, and himself 
to wander aside ? 

The commonplace quality of the thought 
seems to have concurred with the trick of 
the style in winning the public. The transla- 
tion of the famous Cortigiano {The Courtier) 
of the Italian Castiglione, published by Sir 
Thomas Hoby in 1561, has much better style ; 
and there we find neither antithesis nor 
alliteration, neither pedantry nor crudity. 
It was to Hoby that Sir John Cheke addressed 
his famous letter, marvellously spelt, enjoin- 
ing " that our own tongue should be written 
clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with 
borrowing of other tongues, wherein if we 
take not heed by time, ever borrowing and 
never paying, she shall be fain to keep her 
house as a bankrupt." What Sir John 
meant by " never paying " is not clear ; but 
he had no cause to complain of Hoby, who, 
rendering an author whose style was easily 
pellucid, inasmuch as it conveyed nothing 
that was hard to say, makes shift very credit- 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 35 

ably with the current English of his day — 
that is, the early part of the reign of Mary. 
Its most obvious weakness is the prolixity 
engendered by fear of new words ; and in 
the anxiety on this score there is perhaps 
something of undue subservience to the 
counsel of Castiglione, thus rendered by his 
translator (italics ours) : 

To eschew as much as a man may, and as a sharp 
and dangerous rock, affectation or curiosity [= oddity] 
and (to speak a new word) to use in everything a 
certain Reckelessness, to cover art withall, and seem 
whatsoever he doeth and sayeth to do it without 
pain, and (as it were) not minding it. And of this 
do I beheve grace is much derived, for in rare matters 
and well brought to pass every man knoweth the hard- 
ness of them, so that a readiness therein maketh 
great wonder. And contrarwise to use force, and (as 
they say) to hale by the hair, giveth a great disgrace, 
and maketh everything, how great soever it be, to 
be little esteemed. Therefore that may be said to be 
a very art that appeareth not to be art, neither ought 
a man to put more diligence in anything than in covering 
it ; for in case it be open it loseth credit clean, and 
maketh a man litUe set by. And I remember that I 
have read in my days that there were some most 
excellent orators, which among other their cares 
enforced themselves to make every man believe that 
they had no sight in letters, and dissembling their 
cunning, made semblant their orations to be made very 
simply, and rather as nature and truth led them than 
study and art, the which if it had been openly known, 
would have put a doubt in the people's mind for fear 
lest he beguiled them. You may see then how to show 
art and such bent study taketh away the grace of 
everything. 



36 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

But the prolixity is graceful, for the trans- 
lator has caught something of the finished 
simplicity of his original. Commonplace for 
commonplace, that of the Italian book is 
natural and unpretentious where that of the 
Spaniard is forced and pompous. It might 
have been expected that such a book, handling 
themes of very general interest, would have 
had the widest popularity ; but, whether 
through distrust of Italian counsels or aver- 
sion to the craft of the courtier, Hoby's 
version had only four editions in Elizabeth's 
long reign ; and the natural style which he 
cultivated did not win the flattery of imita- 
tion. The jingling antitheses of Guevara 
seem to have gained him by far the wider 
audience. Ascham, who praises Castiglione 
highly, and who in his rage at extravagant 
fashions would have rulers put down " des- 
perate hats," was not proof against fashion 
in sentence-making, and paid his tribute to 
the Spaniard in the only attempts he made 
at style : 

For great ships require costly tackling, and also 
afterward dangerous government : small boats be 
neither very chargeable in making nor very oft in 
great jeopardy ; and yet they carry, many times, as 
good and costly ware as greater vessels do. A mean 
argument may easily bear the light burden of a small 
fault. ... A high title doth charge a man with the 
heavy burden of too great a promise. . . . 

And thus you see how will enticed to wantonness 
doth easily allure the mind to false opinions ; and how 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 37 

corrupt manners in living breed false judgments in 
doctrine ; how sin and fleshliness bring forth sects 
and heresies. And therefore suffer not vain books 
to breed vanity in men's wills, if you would have 
God's truth take root in men's minds. 

Pursuit of the fashion had led the critic 
into the very sin of heaping up words and 
clauses " of one meaning " which he had 
charged upon Hall. 

But the occasional Guevarisms of Ascham 
are as a mere pattering of drops in premoni- 
tion of the thunder- shower to come from 
Lilly in his Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, 
and Euphues and his England (1579 and 1580). 
Lilly as prose-writer has two ruling passions, 
to be didactic and aphoristic, and to keep 
his readers stimulated by a perpetual rattle 
of artificial parallels and more artificial anti- 
theses. By common consent, he did this 
more powerfully than any of his predecessors : 
Guevara is somniferous in comparison ; but 
for any healthy palate any volume of sermons 
of the age supplies more agreeable prose. 
Thus he begins : 

There dwelt in Athens a young gentleman of great 
patrimony, and of so comely a personage that it was 
doubted whether he was more bound to Nature for the 
lineaments of his person, or to Fortune for the in- 
crease of his possessions. 

And thus he ends : 

But were the truth known, I am sure. Gentlemen, it 
would be a hard question among Ladies whether 



38 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Philautus were a better wooer or a husband, whether 
Euphues were a better lover or a scholar. But let 
the one mark the other. I leave them both to confer 
at their next meeting, and commit you to the Almighty. 

All the while between, the style has gone 
thus, with the mechanical vivacity of broad- 
sword fencing on the stage ; and to the tic- 
tac of parallelism there has been chronically 
added a secondary movement of metaphor 
from natural history, normal and legendary : 

As therefore the sweetest rose hath his prickell, 
the finest velvet his brack, so the sharpest wit hath 
his wanton will, and the holiest head his wicked way. 

The fine chrystal is sooner erased than the hard 
marble ; the greenest beech browneth faster than the 
dryest oak ; the fairest silk is soonest soiled ; and 
the sweetest wine turneth to the sharpest vinegar. 

The bird Taurus hath a great voice but a small 
body : the thunder a great clap yet but a httle stone ; 
the empty vessel giveth a greater sound than the full 
barrel. 

Although iron the more it is used the brighter it 
is, yet silver with much wearing doth waste to nothing : 
though the cammock the more it is bowed the better 
it serveth, yet the bow the more it is bent and occupied 
the weaker it waxeth : though the camomill the 
more it is trodden and pressed down, the more it 
spreadeth, yet the violet the oftener it is handled 
and touched the sooner it decayeth. 

Touching the yielding to love, albeit their hearts 
seem tender, yet they harden them hke the stone 
of Sicilia, the which the more it is beaten the harder 
it is. 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 39 

Though the stone CyKndrus at every thunder-clap 
roll from the hill, yet the pure sleek stone mounteth 
at the noise ; though the ruSt fret the hardest steel, 
yet doth it not eat into the emerald ; though polypus 
change his hue, yet the salamander keepeth his colour ; 
though . . , yet . . . ; though . . . yet . . . ; though . , , 
yet . . . ! 

At times something goes wrong with the 
works, and we get the like of this : 

Seeing therefore one may love the clear conduit 
water though he loath the muddy ditch, and wear the 
precious diamond though he despise the ragged brick, 
I think one may also with safe conscience reverence 
the modest sex of honest maidens though he forswear 
the lewd sort of unchaste minions. 

It must have been a very cumbrous prose 
movement to which this St. Vitus' dance could 
come as a relief. But a relief it must have 
been ; for not only was Lilly immensely 
popular in the upper circles for a generation, 
but the tale-writer, Robert Greene, found his 
account in copying his tricks through a whole 
series of loquacious romances, heaping parallels 
on parallels, antitheses upon antitheses, stones 
upon stones. Lilly, to do him justice, had 
the regulation moral purpose, and added 
pedagogy to satire and type-portraiture, re- 
peating the standing doctrine of Plutarch, 
Guevara, Vives, Elyot, and Ascham as to the 
all-importance of sound schoolmastership ; 
besides undertaking to convert atheists to 
orthodoxy by vituperative argument. Above 
all, he had the practical attraction which 



40 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

gives temporary vogue to so much second- 
rate fiction in every age : that of being 
energetically alive up to the limits of his 
creative and reflective faculties. Learned he 
really was ; and people without fineness of 
taste found his prose sparkling, witty, effer- 
vescent, " topical." Thus it came about 
that just before the great period of prose 
which fell between the Armada and the death 
of Elizabeth he figured in the fashionable 
world as the fine flower of literary art. It is 
none the less his hard fate to be remembered 
in terms of the invective of Drayton, or, more 
pleasantly, of the parody put in the mouth 
of Falstaff by the young Shakespeare, whose 
unerring laugh so happily immortalized so 
many of the literary extravagances of his 
time. 

For the rest, the right kind of prose, the 
prose that can be read with satisfaction after 
three hundred years, was evolved in the 
natural way of adapting means to worthy 
ends. Given something to say that was worth 
saying, the sincere writer had to look to his 
vocabulary ; and here he had to steer between 
the extremes of the over-Latinizing school 
and the school which flouted all new or recent 
coinages as inkhorn terms. Sir John Cheke, 
who counselled Hoby, as we saw, to beware 
of borrowing from other tongues, was himself 
guilty of the queerest freaks of classicism as 
well as of nationalism in his translation of part 



PROSE BEFORE SIDNEY 41 

of the New Testament — freaks such as " pre- 
sents " for " apostles," and " mooned " for 
" lunatic " ; and in the very giving of the 
restrictive counsel cancels it. Other tongues, 
above all Latin, simply had to be borrowed 
from, if English was to be equal to its growing 
tasks ; and the early Reformers and the later 
translators alike saw to such expansion. 
Thomas Wilson, who published his Arte of 
Rhetorique under Edward VI in 1553, and ex- 
panded it in 1560, anticipates Cheke's protest 
and lives up to his own ideal. The result is a 
mass of voluble and undistinguished English 
vernacular at the price of prolixity and super- 
ficiality, Wilson being simply an energetic 
person with a good education and a capacity 
to talk spontaneous commonplace at any 
length upon any theme. There is not a 
memorable sentence in his books. His un- 
consciousness of the need for new vocabulary 
was of a piece with the triteness of his thought 
and the vagueness of his analysis of his own 
subject-matter, which he handles with a quite 
primitive simplicity, having apparently no 
knowledge of the work done by the scholastics. 
He has earned benevolent perusal, indeed, by 
his hearty gusto and his public spirit, which 
made him a fit Secretary of State ; but the 
laying on of his hands gave no grace to our 
written speech. 

For the building of a worthy prose therein 
were needed both scholarship and thought^! 



42 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

both borrowing from other tongues and con- 
cern for native idiom, both concern for edifica- 
tion and that concern for beauty which, in 
fortunate times, gives loveUness to common 
implements. Language, hke furniture, may 
be a bare means of service, an ill-proportioned 
and ill-coloured display, or a thing at once 
serviceable and restfuUy beautiful to look 
upon. Our gratitude will always go out, in 
both cases, to those who reconcile utility with 
beauty, and sanity with charm. 



CHAPTER III 

POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 

The appearance, in 1557, of TotteVs Mis- 
cellany of Songs and Sonnets marks the 
effective emergence of what we regard as 
regular modern verse, with a purely English 
accentuation. Not that such verse was a 
new creation : to say nothing of occasional 
stanzas in old ballads or in the mystery plays, 
in which accentual measure is happUy kept 
without return to Chaucerian scansions, the 
brilliant dramatic ballad or duet of the Nut- 
Brown Maid, which dates before 1503, is 
quite regularly rhythmical, albeit with oc- 
casional changes of accent and Chaucerian 
" e's," and a certain primitive marking of 
the caesura. In the Coventry Mysteries (MS. 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 43 

1468) we find such lines as these, spoken by 
Eve: 

Alas ! that ever that speech was spoken 
That the false angel said unto me : 

Alas ! our Maker's bidding is broken. 
For I have touched His own dear tree ; 

where a quite modern freedom of movement is 
attained, with modern pronunciation. This 
was presumably the work of a gifted monk. ' 
The author (or authoress) of the Nut-Brown 
Maid was also a cultured person, who pro- 
bably knew French and Italian ; but he 
handles English metre with a firm and skilful, 
touch, marking his caesura with a rhyme : 

Yet take good hede, for ever I drede 

That ye could not sustain 
The thorny ways, the deep valleys, 

The snow, the frost, the rain ; 
The cold, the heat ; for dry or wete 

We must lodge on the plain ; 
And us above, none other rofe 

But a brake bush or twain : 
Which soon should grieve you, I believe. 

And ye would gladly than 
That I had to the greenwood go * 

Alone, a banished man. 

This duet may or may not have been written 
for singing : either way it would seem bound 
to be popular. Yet, perhaps by reason of its 
very tunefulness, it had no imitators, save in 
devotional verse ; and at 1550 English regular 
verse was represented mainly by Sternhold 

* Gone. 



44 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

and Hopkins's versions of the Psalms, in which 
the " fourteener " was merely cut up into 
quatrains of eight- and of six-syllabled lines 
of which only the second and fourth rhymed. 
It was left to Wyatt and Surrey, whose post- 
humous poems formed the main attraction of 
Tottel's publication of 1557, to effect a new 
departure by a free assimilation of both Italian 
and French poetry, in which both themes and 
measures broke fresh ground. As in Chaucer's 
own case, the impact of the poetry of a people 
who were psychologically more advanced 
than the English opened a new period. 

Beyond question, Wyatt gave the lead to 
Surrey, who avows his discipleship ; but it 
seems certain that Wyatt began translating 
from the Italian without any clear notion of 
metre, or at least without any concern to 
observe it. In reading him, of course, we 
must remember that early Tudor pronuncia- 
tion differed at many points from ours ; so 
that when Wyatt makes " colour " rhyme 
with " therefore," " pleasiure " with err our," 
" service " with " wise," " tune " with " for- 
tune," and " comfort " with " port," he may 
not be straining his own speech ; though when 
we find " Egypt " rhymed with " writ " we 
know a foreign influence is at work ; and in 
such a sequence as " troubelous," " famous," 
and " glorious " we recognize a native mal- 
practice which was continued by scholarly 
and other poets down to the end of the century. 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 45 

But in many cases no metrical rules will avail 
to make Wyatt's verse scan. In Tottel's 
edition we are tempted to effect it by viola- 
tions of accent ; but it turns out that Tottel 
has been " improving " rather than spoiling 
Wyatt's measures ; and exact transcriptions 
of what appear to be authoritative manu- 
scripts force us to give up the attempt. 
At times, indeed, Tottel misses the right 
accentuation, as in the epigram beginning, in 
his version : 

The enemy of life, decayer of all kind. 

Here the manuscript shows, as we might 
have known from Surrey's practice, that 
Wyatt gave the word " enemy " the French 
pronunciation "Th' enn'mi." As regards the 
translated sonnets and the earlier epigrams 
in general, however, there is small satisfaction 
for the reader who reads verse metrically ; 
and we seem forced to the conclusion that 
in his earlier work Wyatt had no metrical 
standards. He seems to have read Chaucer in 
Pynson's edition of 1526, in which the old 
poet's measures are reduced to mere " pie " for 
lack of good texts or, as is probable, through 
entire ignorance of Chaucer's metrical rules. 
Out of that text no one could extract any 
regular rhythm ; and Wyatt seems to have 
contentedly done without any till he took 
to making madrigals and experimented m 
translating some of the terza rima satires of 



46 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

the Italian poet Luigi Alamanni. Even in the 
satires he is irregular, but he has grasped the 
idea of an iambic movement ; and in some 
madrigals written about the same time he at 
last masters metre, notably in that which 
ends : 

Now cease, my lute : this is the last 
Labor that thou and I shall waste, 

And ended is that we begun ; 
Now is this song both sung and past : 

My lute be still, for I have done. 

In the lines beginning "Tagus, farewell," 
written in 1539, the rhythm is equally secure ; 
and in the Penitential Psalms, begun about 
that time and posthumously published (1549), 
he achieved what is technically his most 
interesting performance, an English approxi- 
mation to the liquid movement of Italian 
verse, hardly again attempted in English 
poetry till the nineteenth century. And this, 
like so much of Wyatt's work, is no expression 
of personal feeling, but a translation or ver- 
sion of Pietro Aretino's prose paraphrase of 
the Penitential Psalms — the literary exercise 
of one of the least devotional of Italian men 
of letters. 

Thus we reach the curious paradox that the 
stream of modern English poetry takes its 
rise with a man of affairs who for years wrote 
poetry, mostly translated from the Italian, 
without attempting to produce either English 
or Italian measure ; then gradually realized, 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 47 

with Italian help, how verse should be written ; 
and practically ended with exercises in ac- 
centual rhythm on Italian lines. In this 
fashion did Wyatt compete with Sternhold 
and Hopkins : 

My flesh is troubled, my heart doth fear the spear ; 

The dread of death, of death that ever lasts, 
Threateth of right, and draweth near and near. 

Much more, my soul is troubled by the blasts 
Of these assaults that come as thick as hail 
Of worldly vanity, that temptation casts 

Against the weak bulwark of the flesh frail 

Wherein the soul in great perplexity 
Feleth the senses, with them that assail. 

But it was not through his version of 
Aretino's paraphrase of the Psalms that 
Wyatt was to become a force in English 
poetry : it was through his miscellaneous 
verse, reproduced and partly trimmed by 
Tottel ; and above all by his stimulating 
influence on the young Earl of Surrey. 

That ill-starred noble is perceptibly a man 
of genius. In his heedless youth he was, 
with other roysterers, capable of making 
midnight war on the windows of London 
citizens with " stone-bows," otherwise cata- 
pults ; and then of justifying himself in a 
versified declaration that he had been moved 
to that course by his resentment of the 
burghers' vices. When he came to his end 
on the block (1547) at thirty, by a monstrous 



48 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

sentence upon an absurd charge of treason, 
ratified by the warrant of the dying old 
king, the London burghers and his country- 
men generally forgave him ; and in a later 
day they took his poetry to their hearts. It 
was with an Italianate sonnet of his that 
Wyatt's Psalms came out two years later ; 
and the fact that both poets lay marked stress 
on the subject of sinful old kings raises a 
speculation as to whether a perusal by Henry 
of Surrey's sonnet had anything to do with 
his indictment and execution. 

Eager in all things, Surrey had been the 
warm disciple and panegyrist of Wyatt, in 
whose verse he evidently found a psychic 
interest not presented to him by previous 
English poetry. It came, of course, from the 
Italian. The abundance of violent life which 
had filled the fifteenth century, and which had 
been renewed in the later years of Henry VIII, 
was not yet become food for either poetry or 
adequate prose. Rather it would seem that 
violent action moves the actors and spectators 
to seek mental relief in contrary states, and 
in forms of art which call up another order 
of sensations. Only the impact of foreign 
culture made notable poets of Wyatt and 
Surrey ; and only in an age of comparative 
domestic peace was their legacy to become 
fruitful. 

Wyatt's lead, then, was skilfully taken up 
by Surrey. One of the most ungoverned 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 49 

men of his time, and qualified above all 
things to make enemies, he was also capable, 
as his praise of Wyatt shows, of strong 
attachments, and of framing verse by rules 
of art. If we can trust the copies preserved 
of his poems, he too felt himself drawn by 
differing methods. Much more often than 
Wyatt he reverts to the native jigging measure 
in long lines, so commonly fatal to poetic 
elevation. In the new verse, again, as did 
Spenser later, he at times employs the 
Chaucerian scansion, as in 

The nightes chair [or car] the starres about doth bring 

But though he had been specially schooled in 
Italian in his boyhood, he shows much less 
tendency than either Wyatt or Douglas to 
reflect Italian rhythm. He had not, like 
Wyatt, travelled in Italy, the common state- 
ment to that effect being a myth. On the 
other hand, he betrays a disposition to the 
perilous course of " quantitative " classic 
measures, as in the piece beginning : 

Of thy Hfe, Thomas, this compass well mtark. 
Not aye with full sails the high seas to beat. 

It may be taken for granted that both. 
Wyatt and Surrey, for whom the old tune 
of alternate lines of twelve and fourteen 
syllables was the onlj^ regular native measure, 
were disposed, like a number of later scholar- 
poets, to seek a less primitive music in various 

4 



50 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

semblances of classic song ; and some such 
craving may have underlain Wyatt's early 
irregularities, as it actually did lead Surrey 
to create our blank verse. But even that 
creation was in advance of the taste of the 
age ; and other experiments of a quasi- 
classical order were mere snares for an im- 
mature art. Not till our own time have any 
really skilful poets set themselves to give to 
verse in general, with due moderation, the 
rhythmic variety which Shakespeare lent to 
blank verse, and of which some touch was 
early found essential in the heroic couplet. 
Verse had to become law-abiding, as of old, 
before it could be free. The Scots poet, 
Gawain Douglas, had already, after compass- 
ing a tolerably regular stanza verse in his 
King Heart, penned (1513) a translation of 
Virgil's Mneid in heroic couplets marked by 
a constant bent, doubtless under Italian 
influence, to accentual as against merely 
syllabic metre. But though Douglas has 
many a strong and many a freshly charming 
line, he also was too far from mastery of his 
craft to set up a new standard, even if his 
dialect had been acceptable to or legible by 
Englishmen. What Surrey might have done 
had he lived long enough to mellow his charac- 
ter may be guessed from some of the poems 
in which he diverged from common modes ; 
for instance, the Complaint of the maiden 
whose lover is at sea : 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 51 

When other lovers in arms across 

Kejoice their chief dehght. 
Drowned in tears, to mourn my loss, 

I stand the bitter night 
In my window, where I may see 
Before the winds how the clouds flee : 
Lo ! what mariner love hath made me ! 

There is an inwardness of feeling as well as 
a subtlety of music here that will not easily 
be found in English poetry of that century. 
Thus gifted, the cousin of Anne Boleyn, 
Lord Rochford, and Catherine Howard, 
witness of the executions of all three, might 
with time have produced poetry of a palpable 
greatness. As it was, he ranked in his day 
and the next as the most finished and graceful 
master of the love poem ; and he added to 
that the more memorable achievement of 
creating English blank verse, the one for- 
tunate imitation of classical methods of which 
the language was capable. It was in a trans- 
lation of the second and fourth books of the 
Mneid, posthumously published (1557) like 
his other work, that he rendered the service. 
It is hardly possible, in view of his Italian 
culture, to doubt that he was led to this 
experiment by those already made in Italy, 
which had further been copied in Spain, in 
a blank-verse translation of the Odyssey. 
But Surrey's experiment is quite individual ; 
and though he did not live to perfect the new 
instrument, his technique at its best was 
hardly improved upon until, when the form 



52 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

had been established in drama, it was taken 
up by Shakespeare. Surrey's blank verse is 
emphatically epic and Virgilian; and to say 
this is to credit it with a kind of beauty not 
to be looked for in dramatic poetry. The 
opening lines : 

They whisted all, with fixed face attent. 
When prince JEtueas from the royal seat 
Thus gan to speak. O Queen ! it is thy will 
I should renew a woe cannot be told — 

sound a note that carries down to Tennyson, 
who is visibly a student of the initial Master. 
Such lines as 

The clamour strake up to the golden stars . . . 

By friendly silence of the quiet moon. . , . 

Searching, all wounded, the long galleries 
And the void courts. . . . 

might almost have been his. The inevitable 
blemishes of the beginner's work come mostly 
of undue reliance on the measure of " quan- 
tity," and too dutiful concern for a regular 
caesura. But the touch is often uncertain; 
and so many lines fail to scan properly that 
conservative taste was only too well coun- 
tenanced in resistance to the new form. 
Yet, withal, Surrey at the very outset re- 
vealed resources in it that his successors were 
very slow to realize and develop. Sackville 
and Norton used it in F err ex and Porrex (1561) 
with less than the inventor's skill, failing to 
realize the importance of the varied pau^e 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 53 

and the run-on line ; and Thomas Hughes's 
tragedy. The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587), 
which shows no influence from any of the pro- 
fessional dramatists who about that time 
were trying the form, goes back to Surrey 
rather than to the tragedy-writers who first 
followed him. So far, only Spenser, in one 
youthful experiment, shows any faculty for 
developing the new form in non-dramatic 
poetry. 

Strange to say, no one attempted to carry 
on Surrey's translation of Virgil in the same 
verse-form. Gawain Douglas, the first to 
achieve a complete " British " translation, 
had made a fierce attack, in his first prologue, 
upon the patchwork, translated from the 
French, which the good Caxton had given out 
as the Book of Eneydos, As Douglas protested : 

It hes na thing ado therwith, God wait. 

Nor na mair like than the devill and sanct Austyae ; 

Have he na thank therfor, but lost his pyne. 

So shamefully that story did pervert. 

I red his werk with harmes at my hert, 
adds the Bishop, in his rhythmic line. 

That sic ane buik, but sentence or engyne,* 
Suld be intitulit efter the poet devyne. 

It would seem as if what he called the 

Sharp [= keen or fine] sugurate song Virgiliane, 
So wisely wrought with never a word in vain, 

* Without judgment {sententia) or genius. 



54 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

daunted the southrons, most of whom 
no doubt met Douglas's attempt with the 
contemporary form of the " Fools rush in " 
maxim. But not only was Surrey's fragment 
left untouched ; the next translator, Thomas 
Phaer, physician, who published his version 
of the first seven books of the ^neid in 
1558, deliberately reverted to the " four- 
teener," by way, as he declared, of vindicating 
the English language, which had been deemed 
incapable of high poetic effects. That is to 
say, he defended the claims of the vernacular 
in a metre which only a strong poet, as Chap- 
man was later to show, could raise to poetic 
distinction, and which in any case was as 
unsuitable to Virgil as it was adaptable to 
Homer. Phaer' s translation is in every way 
inferior to Surrey's. For lines like 

But to the hills and wide holts when they came. 
From the rocks' top the driven savage rose, 

we have such lines as 

Lo there again where Pallas sits, on forts and castle- 
towers. 

With Gorgon's eyes in lightning clouds inclosed grim 
she lowers, 

which Phaer thought " a more clean and 
compendious order of metre than heretofore 
hath been accustomed." It was possibly the 
best going when he began his task in 1555 ; 
but in TotteVs Miscellany ^Sipsiit from Surrey 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 55 

and Wyatt, there were represented many- 
hands capable of quite regular " fourteeners." 
Nicholas Grimald, who wrote heroic couplets, -^ 
was at home in the more vernacular line, as 
thus : 

Now flaming Phebus passing through his heavenly 

region high 
The uttrest Ethiopian folk with fervent beams doth 

fry. 

It was doubtless the employment of the 
measure (in quatrain) in the translation of 
the Psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins that 
gave it or reinforced its vogue, and so brought 
about the completion of Phaer's task by 
other hands. He lived only to finish the 
eighth and ninth books, dying in 1558; 
whereafter another physician, Thomas Twine 
of Lewes, completed the task, with Maphgeus's 
supplemental or thirteenth book ; the whole 
being published in 1583, and thrice reprinted 
down to 1620. Abraham Fleming did the 
Georgics and Bucolics in an Alexandrinp or 
twelve-syllabled blank verse in 1589, but 
that was no better than Phaer and Twine ; 
and Robert Stany hurst's astonishing version 
of four books of the ^neid into what he called 
English hexameters (1583) could have found 
serious readers only in Bedlam. The metre 
was under-blamed by Thomas Nashe when 
he described it as a " foul, lumbering, bois- 
terous, wallowing measure." In short, there 



56 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

was to be no tolerable English translation of 
the whole Mneid until Dryden's, so essen- 
tially un-Virgilian. Surrey's lead had on that 
side been given in vain. Barnabe Googc, 
writing about 1560, praises Douglas as hav- 
ing " won the Ball " in translating Virgil, and 
avows that 

The noble Henry Howard once, tnat raught [= reached] 

eternal fame. 
With mighty style did bring a piece of Virgil's work 

in frame. 

But he extols Phaer as having transcended all 
rivalry in his unfinished work, which, Googe 
predicted, " never man shall end." The old 
measure, thus glorified, was employed by 
Arthur Golding in his version (1565) of Ovid's 
Metamorphoses, which had the fortune to be 
read and used by Shakespeare. Golding, who 
produced a multitude of prose translations 
from the French as well as this, is justly pro- 
nounced " on the whole a better poet and a 
better translator than Phaer"; and it was 
doubtless he rather than Phaer who encouraged 
Chapman to use the measure in translating 
the Iliad, 

The national proclivity to the long line of 
fourteen syllables is further seen persisting in 
the Eglogs, Epytaphes, and Sonettes of Googe 
(1563), who seems literally to have been 
forced into print by the masterful urgency 
of admiring friends. By the accident of 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 57 

large type and a narrow page, Googe's 
" fourteeners," here as in his translation of 
the Latin Zodiacus Vitce of an Italian poet, 
appear in quatrains of eight- and six-syllabled 
lines, like Sternhold and Hopkins's version of 
the Psalms, only the second and fourth lines 
rhyming. In that fashion they go easily 
enough, Googe having a gift of fluency ; but 
he cannot resist the temptation given by the 
metre to prolixity. Only here and there, as 
in his longest poem, Cupido Conquered, does 
he attain a naive note of sheer poetry. As 
here, before a line of sheer doggerel : 

Great pleasure had I there to bide and stare upon the 

spring. 
For why me thought it did surmount all other kind of 

thing. 

The ten tragedies of Seneca were rendered in 
the same jingle by a series of hands from 
1560 onwards. 

Poetic evolution proceeded by way of profit 
from the new ideal of regular metre, crudely 
realized in the " fourteener," and it was again 
an aristocrat who successfully innovated. 
During the reign of Mary a young English 
noble, Thomas Sackville, afterwards Lord 
Buckhurst and first Earl of Dorset, was 
moved by the long retrospect of turmoil and 
tragedy in English life to interest himself in 
a plan for a series of didactic poems setting 
forth the eases of the more eminent victims. 



58 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

The title chosen was A Mirrour for Magis- 
trates. Like most other Uterary enterprises 
of the age, this had been suggested by foreign 
example. Boccaccio had produced (1360) a 
Latin history Of the Falls of Illustrious Men 
and Women (beginning with Adam and Eve) 
which had been freely translated and expanded 
in French ; and the French book in turn had 
been profusely translated by the monk Lyd- 
gate (circa 1430) into English stanza verse, 
under the title of The Fall of Princes, with 
small acceptance. For English edification, 
there were required English " tragedies," 
as such simple recitals were then termed ; 
and Sackville and his coadjutors planned an 
English selection, copying Boccaccio's alle- 
gorical and dramatic machinery. Becoming 
an active diplomatist and statesman, he had 
to leave the execution of the main body of the 
work to the others ; and in due course there 
was compiled a kind of rhymed encyclopaedia 
of tragic historical and legendary episodes, 
covering, besides the legendary period, a 
hundred and fifty years of British history, 
down to the latter part of the fifteenth century. 
All that is now readable with any zest is 
Sackville's own Induction, in which, sub- 
stituting the figure of Sorrow for Boccaccio's 
Fortune, the poet presents himself to be con- 
ducted by that guide to Avernus, in a nar- 
rative recalling sometimes Virgil and some- 
times Dante. At once we are conscious of an 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 59 

established prosody. Save for a few obsolete 
words and idioms, Sackville's is the modern 
English speech ; and his lines are invariably- 
regular. The Chaucerian e is done with, once 
for all ; and the metre sets up no difficulty 
whatever. The seven-line stanza is that of 
Chaucer, borrowed from the Italian, and it 
is managed as carefully as ever his was. Sir 
Thomas More had tried it in his youth, in a 
poem which may have suggested Sackville's. 
As to the poetry, Sackville is not exactly in 
the great line ; but he has true poetic feeling 
and a taste in diction that yields at times a 
fine sonority, as in the vision of Pluto's realm : 

Thence came we to the horror and the hell. 
The large great kingdoms and the dreadful reign 
Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell : 
The wide waste places and the hugy plain. 

Reading the Induction, one has a surmise 
that if the writer could have left allegory 
alone, he might have been an effective poet of 
nature and human experience. As usual, the 
allegory turns to confusion : in two succes- 
sive stanzas, of really high quality. Sleep is 
respectively concrete and abstract, repellent 
in the first form and attractive in the second : 

By him [Care] lay heavy Sleep, the cousin of Death, 

Flat on the ground, and still as any stone, 

A very corpse, save yielding forth a breath ; 

Small keep [heed] took he, whom fortune frowned on. 

Or whom she hf ted up into the throne 

Of high renown; but as a living death. 

So, dead alive, of life he drew the breath. 



60 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

The body^s rest, the quiet of the heart. 

The travail's ease, the still night's fere [comrade] was he 

And of our life in earth the better part ; 

Keaver of sight, and yet in whom we see 

Things oft that chance and oft that never be ; 

Without respect esteemed equally 

Ejng Croesus' pomp and Irus' poverty. 

But when we have passed the Induction and 
met the grisly ghost of Henry Duke of 
Buckingham (the tool and victim of Richard 
Crookback), who proceeds to deliver his 
" Complaint," we are soon glad to go back 
to the allegory. The narrative business is 
dismally " instructive " in Sackville's hands ; 
and in the succeeding episodes, by various 
versifiers, the tedium grows insupportable. 
Baldwin, the most diligent contributor, was 
an ecclesiastic, a schoolmaster, and an un- 
tiring compiler of lives, sayings, similes, 
proverbs, and moral commonplaces, to one 
set of which he gave the title of A Treatise 
of Moral Philosophy. Of philosophy it never 
comes within sight ; yet it was further ex- 
panded by a kindred spirit, and had a long 
and possibly useful life as a handbook for 
serious youth and age. 

This kind of literature, in fact, with that 
of devotion, met a need more widely felt in 
the sixteenth century than any craving for 
poetry in the modern sense. The Mirrour, 
which was first published in 1559, reprinted 
in 1563, 1571, and 1574, and extensively eked 
out in 1587 by John Higgins, clergyman, 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 61 

schoolmaster, and lexicographer, was probably 
the most widely read mass of serious secular 
verse in Elizabeth's reign, and is more broadly 
characteristic of the taste of the time than 
any poetry of a higher kind. Apart from Sid- 
ney and Jonson, most men, Spenser included, 
were agreed that the main end of poetry 
was moral edification ; and here the moral 
end was as squarely faced as in any catechism. 
No reader of the Mirrour could be accused, 
as were the readers of the Canterbury Tales 
and the Morte d^ Arthur by old Roger Ascham, 
of battening upon impropriety. In those 
funereal folios vice is never presented save for 
reprobation and condign punishment : the 
poetry is of the kind that Puritans could read 
without a qualm of conscience. As for the 
implied aim of regularizing life and public 
polity, that was as far promoted as good ends 
ever are by bad homilies. In that compara- 
tively peaceful age, men had come to read of 
past human shipwrecks with a sense of edifica- 
tion in the sheer perusal ; and the prevailing 
appetite, which partly determined the poetic 
course of Spenser, continued to be ministered 
to by better poets, such as Daniel and Drayton, 
after Elizabeth had passed away. 

The poetry of pleasure, moral and other, 
to some extent grew up alongside the litera- 
ture of rhymed information and instruction. 
Sackville, perhaps with some collaboration 
from Thomas Norton (who helped Sternhold 



62 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

and Hopkins with their metrical version of 
the Psalms), produced Gorboduc, or F err ex 
and Porrex (1561), the first regular English 
tragedy, a work as resolutely edificatory as 
the Mirrour. But the drama was destined to 
take care of itself, to the happier end of enter- 
taining men ; and the Elizabethans all the 
while somehow came by " Songs and Son- 
nets " of varying merit. TotteVs Miscellany 
includes some pieces that can still sing 
for us, like ancient harpsichords not wholly 
mouldered or unstrung. The device of 
breaking up "twelves" and " f ourteeners " 
into quatrains of alternately rhyming lines, 
for instance, results in a quaintly charming 
pastoral ballad, Harpelus^ Complaint ; a good 
lover's song. Give place you ladies, and begone ; 
and the odd old canticle of Lord Vaux, The 
Aged Lover renounceth Love, of which broken 
fragments reappear in the mouth of the grave- 
digger in Hamlet. 

There must have been a large unpublished 
output of such verse in the early Elizabethan 
years. In 1575 and 1576, one writer, George 
Gascoigne, put forth the accumulations of a 
motley life of forty years, to the extent of 
over a thousand quarto pages of verse and 
prose. Without attaining to greatness or 
special charm in any species, he typifies 
much of the culture-life of upper-class Eng- 
land in his day. Educated at Cambridge, 
he entered Gray's Inn, and committed follies 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 68 

enough to cause him, by one account, to be 
disinherited by his father, Sir John Gascoigne. 
Yet he sat in ParHament in 1557-8 and 1558-9. 
After forfeiting or wasting his patrimony, he 
married a wealthy widow, mother of the minor 
poet Nicholas Breton, and stood for Mid- 
hurst in 1572, only to be rejected, on the 
strength of documents laid before the Privy 
Council, as a notoriously bad character, a 
skulking debtor, a ruffian, and an atheist. 
Whatever he may have been, he was not the 
last ; for his prose work includes a series of 
fervidly devotional treatises, largely borrowed, 
but all strictly orthodox. He called himself 
a soldier, and did serve in the Low Countries, 
where, as at home, he got into jail. His 
literary character is as hard to whitewash as 
his social ; for his collective works include 
a licentious tale, on Italian lines, which is 
strongly suspected of being a base betrayal of 
one of his own intrigues. But his versatility 
remains remarkable. With equal facility he 
turns out sonnets, rhymed moral and peni- 
tential discourses, translations of comedy and 
tragedy from the Italian, didactic " morality " 
drama and immorality romance of his own, 
and the string of devotional treatises afore- 
said, all marked by the same torrential flow 
of composition, all coherent, all grammatical, 
all the verse correctly scanned, all finally 
negligible. As a poet he runs chiefly to the 
old " twelves " and "fourteener " lines, leav- 



64 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

ing the latter such even when, like others, he 
divides it in quatrains rhyming only in the 
second and fourth lines ; but he tried blank 
verse in his satire. The Steel Glass, and in 
his collaborative tragedy, Jocasta, professedly 
translated from Euripides, but really from a 
free Italian version, founded on the Latin. 
In neither does he handle the new form with 
any technical mastery, the line being nearly 
always a clause in itself. His facility of pro- 
duction is illustrated by the account given 
of five poems in his Flowers : 

And thus an end of these five themes admounting 
to the number of 258 verses, devised riding by the 
way, writing none of them until he came at the end 
of his journey, the which was no longer than one day 
in riding, one day in tarrying with his friend, and the 
third in returning to Gray's Inn ; and therefore called 
Gascoigne's Memories. 

Not thus, is the higher poetry producible. 
Gascoigne was simply an uncommonly clever 
dilettante, as may be finally gathered from 
his Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the 
Making of Verse or Byrne in English, written, 
with his invariable facility, at the request of 
an Italian friend. Therein he tells how any 
man may make verses of any sort, especially 
the alternate twelve-and-fourteen, happily 
labelled by him " poulter's measure, which 
giveth twelve for one dozen and fourteen for 
another J' We gather from his remarks on 
Chaucer's verse that he knew nothing of its 



POETRY BEFORE SPENSER 65 

rule of the sounded final " e," since he claims 
that, " being read with understanding, the 
longest verse and that which hath most 
syllables in it, will fall (to the ear) correspon- 
dent unto one which hath fewest syllables in 
it." That is, he read Chaucer non-metrically, 
in a loose accentual rhythm, as a friendly poet 
might ; though his own verse all belongs to 
the modern and regular order, counting by 
syllables. 

On the whole, Gascoigne is a thoroughly 
Elizabethan figure, alike in his character 
and his work, his licence and his piety, his 
" Italianate " culture, and his unflagging 
interest in literary experiment. He knew 
nothing very well (unless, perhaps, Italian) 
and did nothing very well ; his moralizing 
and his immoralism were doubtless equally 
spontaneous; yet he helped forward both 
drama and poetry, whatever he did for re- 
ligion ; and it was in keeping with the stand- 
ards of the time that after his early death in 
1577 he should be credited by his literary 
friend, George Whetstone, with a " well- 
employed life and godly end." In any case, 
he challenges our attention in that he was 
nearer the Elizabethan average than better 
men and better poets. 

Much less interest, indeed, attaches to the 
quite decorous work of such men as Thomas 
Howell, who in 1581 published a collection of 
short poems under the title H, His Devises^ 

5 



66 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

for his own Exercise nd his Friends'* Plea- 
sure, " Exercise," we feel, is the right word, 
whatever may have been the response of 
the friends ; for there is barely a stanza in 
the book that suggests anything in the nature 
of poetic afflatus. Any one fondly disposed to 
think there was a virtue in Elizabethan life 
which made all poets lyrical can be well 
disillusioned by a perusal of this collection of 
laboured trifles. By some inexplicable acci- 
dent he has contrived a stanza or two of pure 
poetry in a didactic piece otherwise remark- 
able only for conscientious carpentry. As 
thus : 

I doubt the Dryades 

Amidst the forest chace. 
And thinking on the Seas 

I dread the Mermaid's grace. 

Apart from that one flower, the book is a 
mere hortus siccus or collection of clipped 
yews and boxes, provocative of speculation 
as to the reaction of taste in costume upon 
taste in literature. 



CHAPTER IV 

SPENSER 

A CLEAR psychological conception of " the 
poet " will hardly be attained by way of a 
study of the chief English singer of the six- 
teenth century. If we were to outline his 



SPENSER 67 

career as men do that of one whom they 
antagonize, we should describe Edmund 
Spenser as occupying the earlier part of his 
mature life in seeking his fortune at Court, 
producing poetry by the way ; and the latter 
part, spent in Ireland, in the production of 
a voluminous ethical allegory while he lived 
a life wholly alien and hostile to that around 
him, upon which he had been imposed by a 
Crown gift of confiscated land. His great 
poem began to appear in the year after the 
Armada ; and it belongs alike in spirit and 
in idea to the fabulous age of chivalry. He 
is no harmonizer of life : as little is he an 
interpreter of it. But to see this is only to 
realize once more that a poet is something 
else than a prophet, an artist other than a 
philosopher. Spenser, for his age a teacher, 
is for us first and last a maker of the music 
of words, a creator of rhythmical and phrase- 
ological beauty ; and it is in virtue of that 
faculty that he has retained through three 
poetic eras the status of " the poets' poet." 

In English literature, he begins the great 
line of the university poets. A poor man's 
son, helped by others to his schooling, he was 
from his earliest London days bookish ; and 
at the age of sixteen or seventeen (if we can 
be at all sure about the merely inferred year 
of his birth) we find him contributing transla* 
tions from the French to a composite volume, 
The Theatre of Worldlings (1569), published in 



68 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

an English translation for one Vander Noodt, 
a Flemish refugee. The compiler professes 
to have translated from the Dutch and 
Flemish two " sonnet " series taken from 
Du Bellay and from Marot's rendering of 
Petrarch, which are substantially identical 
with the two versions later published by or 
for Spenser, in his miscellaneous volume of 
1590, the latter as "formerly translated." 
The mystification is not yet wholly cleared 
up ; but it is obvious that the verse transla- 
tions are by an English hand ; and as Vander 
Noodt seems to have been his friend, it can 
hardly be doubted that they are really by 
the young Spenser, who in the year of their 
issue entered Cambridge University. He was 
thus already something of a linguist (unless, 
indeed, Vander Noodt had given him prose 
versions to versify) ; and no less remarkable 
is the fact that the translation later called 
The Visions of Bellay, which in 1590 has been 
put in rhyme, appears in the first form in 
fluid and limpid blank verse — necessarily 
primitive as regards its " end-stopped " 
structure, as was most English blank verse 
before Shakespeare, but fresh, fluent, and 
really flawless ; the " irregular " lines being 
in fact forerunners of our most modern 
rhythmical innovations. About his seven- 
teenth year Spenser had written some of the 
best English blank verse yet produced. 
The process of his formation, only slightly 



SPENSER 69 

to be traced in biographic record, is to be 
divined from the beginnings. All his studies 
he tended to " turn to favour and to pretti- 
ness." He spent a number of years in " the 
north " — somewhere about Pendle Hill, on 
the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire. 
And if we are to conclude that the rustic 
diction which fills the Shepherd^s Calendar 
and colours the Faerie Queene was a dialect 
there spoken, we are left with the puzzling 
inference that Lancashire or Yorkshire folk 
in those days used a dialect that was in large 
part identical with Lowland Scots, for only 
in Scots are many of his words latterly cur- 
rent. Courting, studying, mixing with rustic 
life, or seeking secretarial occupation or Court 
patronage, conning alternately Chaucer and 
the classics, and the French and the Italians, 
planning some poems never written and pen- 
ning a number now lost, he must have been 
perpetually experimenting. Under the influ- 
ence of his friend, Gabriel Harvey, at college 
and later, he produced strange shapes of 
pseudo-classic rhythm, norms incapabie of 
survival in English, while he made no further 
attempt in the sound form of blank verse. 
But his hold on or love for Chaucer and 
archaic English saved him from going far in 
the blind alley of pedantry. 

On the other hand his archaism and rusti- 
cism, the instinctive resort of so many poets 
since, and the natural device of sensitive 



70 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

spirits conscious of the prosaic air of the 
present, served to win him the favour of 
readers similarly minded, at some cost of 
miasculine strength. To turn from Spenser, 
either to the objective verse of Marlowe or 
Shakespeare or to the later subjective verse 
of Jonson or Chapman or Donne, is to realize 
that the more virile natures perforce took 
another way. They are signally modern by 
contrast. Spenser, with all his originality, 
is artistically atavistic, both in form and sub- 
stance. But that, after all, is for the given 
artist the way of being himself ; and Spenser's 
power is in its own kind as rare as any. 

His artistic greatness becomes clear as soon 
as we note his public emergence ten years after 
his precocious start. At the date of the 
publication of the Shepherd^ s Calendar (1579), 
Elizabethan verse had at no point excelled 
the legacy of Surrey and Wyatt. Neither in 
satire nor in lyric had Gascoigne transcended 
their inspiration ; and a contempt for poetry 
as a form of trifling was still perhaps the ruling 
sentiment among men of the world. That 
way of thinking doubtless persisted ; but 
thenceforth the lovers of verse had justifica- 
tion for their faith. The Calendar might be 
compared with the concert performance of 
a modern virtuoso in music : * it reveals at 
once the highest reach of executive faculty 
in the widest range of artistic forms that 
Englishmen had yet seen in their own Ian- 



SPENSER 71 

guage. Only a born and trained master 
of verse could have achieved such vigour 
with such melody of utterance ; such ease 
in a dozen styles ; such expert facility in 
transfigured folk-song along with such evi- 
dent scholarly accomplishment. Here again 
Spenser was following the French lead of 
Marot, two of the eclogues being paraphrases 
from him ; but the pupil is himself grown a 
master. Sidney, half true poet, half artistic 
dilettante, might balk at the archaism and the 
rusticism ; but for him and for all the cul- 
tured youth of England here was no addi- 
tional dilettante but a new master, to whom 
hats must be lifted. 

The mark of many-sidedness, of variety of 
art and of interest, is upon all the rest of 
Spenser's miscellaneous poetry, ranging as it 
does from the satirical and topical verse of 
Mother Hubbard's Tale and Colin ClouVs 
Come Home Again to the andante music of 
the Epithalamion and the high soprano flight 
of the Four Hymns, youthful performances 
inspired by Plato. Not till the nineteenth 
century was there to come another poet with 
such diversity of theme and power. 

It may be, indeed, that Spenser pays the 
penalty of many-sidedness and fecundity in 
a failure to reach the topmost height of excel- 
lence in any one whole poem : that he com- 
pares rather with the multiform and motley 
exuberance of Browning than with the 



72 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

finished perfection of the master-songs of 
Milton and Tennyson. Even the Epithala- 
mion will not bear the full weight of praise 
that has been heaped upon it : such a line as 

Those trouts and pikes all others do excell 

tells of a failure either of inspiration or of 
judgment ; and there are other items of 
padding. But all this does not affect the 
conclusion that Spenser is the fu-st great 
master in modern English poetry ; that his 
artistic endowment is of the rarest fulness ; 
and that he marks and opens an era. No- 
thing comparable to the Epithalamion and 
the Prothalamion for sheer variety of melody 
and wealth of charm had ever before appeared 
in English, or was to appear for many a day 
after. Tried by the standard of previous 
achievement, Spenser is simply alone : there 
is no rival. His shorter pieces constitute a 
new kind of poem and new kinds of beauty ; 
and his magnum opus, which is not thus unique, 
is none the less above contemporary rivalry. 
V/ith the appearance of the first three cantos 
of the Faerie Queene there is bestowed upon 
modern English literature something lost since 
Chaucer's day, the franchise of the historic 
kingdom of civilized song, reaching from 
Homer down the ages. The mere power to 
produce without limit continuous and canor- 
ous verse, as perfectly ordered in its own 
fashion as that of any other language, stood 



SPENSER 73 

for something more than the moral content 
of the poem. That, indeed, tells clearly- 
enough of mental immaturity, alike in its 
obtrusiveness and in its inadequacy. But, 
save for the sombre stanza-poetry of Sack- 
ville, English metric art had not latterly 
revealed any capacity to compete with such 
European masters as Ariosto and Tasso. It 
was in the apprentice stage, occupied with 
minor tasks such as Spenser himself had 
transcended once for all in his Calendar. 
Tutored by the Italian epic-makers, and in 
especial by Ariosto — ^without whose example, 
and that of Tasso, his great poem would never 
have been written — he now essays their larger 
art, passing from folk-song, as it were, to 
symphony. A living poet has vividly de- 
scribed the magical advance of Shakespeare 
on his greatest predecessor as a substitution 
for " gong and cymbals' din " of 

The continuity, the long slow s'ope 
And vast curve of the gradual vioiin. 

With perhaps no more qualification than is 
strictly called for in the case p"t, the same 
may be said of Spenser's advance upon his 
predecessors in rhymed ver-^e. His mere 
stanza is admittedly a new felic'ty, the long 
closing line having an incalculable melodic 
value ; and his gift of lovely phrase at once 
electrified his fellow-craftsmen, as it has de- 
lighted song-lovers ever since. 



74 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

It is too true that all this new wealth of 
beauty is in part countervailed by artistic 
blemishes of the most grievous kind. The art 
of Spenser is no less of a paradox than his 
character, his life. When, seeking to know 
the man, we scan closely his prose View of the 
Present State of Ireland, we find ourselves look- 
ing through eyes clear and hard as glass, a 
personality as narrow and ungenial as that 
of any Spanish conquistador of the age. The 
" cold " Bacon, in this regard, shows by far 
the wider vision, the warmer touch of what 
we should call either poetic or statesmanlike 
sympathy. Spenser was as far from the 
humanism of Whitman or even of Tennyson 
as the Lord Grey of his day was from that 
of the Sir George Grey of ours. We feel 
that, with all his antiquarian outlook, his re- 
lation to the Irish folk around him was rather 
that of a later American frontiersman to 
a Comanche, or of a Massachusetts Puritan to 
a Pequod. And in his work he is just as 
duplex. In the Faerie Queene, the master 
of the lovely line and the exquisite phrase 
outgoes the popular dramatists in his resort 
to images of nastiness ; and with all his 
moralizing his imagination is often gratuit- 
ously gross. It has been said of him, with 
strict truth, that for purposes of reading 
aloud in a mixed company, Spenser's chief 
poem would require far more excision than 
would that of Ariosto. To saint him for 



SPENSER 75 

" purity " because of his Puritan tone and 
tactic is either to garble or to overlook much 
of his matter. The mere nauseousness of 
much of his imagery must set a sensitive 
modern reader chronically thinking of disin- 
fectants. 

Once for all, we must realize that we are 
dealing with a poet, and a poet of the English 
Renaissance at that ; not with a thinker. He 
is an artist in words in an age of foul smells 
and much foul talk. Spenser's poetry, at 
least in the bulk of the Faerie Queene, is in 
no sense " philosophical." His Four Hymns, 
wherein he makes his chief effort of a philo- 
sophic kind, are but youthful paraphrases 
of Plato. Philosophy was in fact not yet 
become an English study ; and Spenser had 
no original power of that kind. In his great 
poem, for sheer lack of abstract thinking 
power, he multiplies crudities of allegory 
which alternately suggest charades and bur- 
lesque — as when, in the second book, Guyon 
wrestles with Furor and has to tie up Occasion 
in order to succeed. It is no use to say with 
Hazlitt that the allegory will not bite us. It 
does, persistently, as if the poet felt that we 
had thus to be kept awake. Having ex- 
hausted one allegorical thesis he turns his 
figures to some other thesis, making Duessa 
now Queen Mary, now the Church of Rome. 

All the while he shows no real allegorical 
gift. The whole theorem of the Blatant 



76 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Beast as = popular calumny is frigid mechan- 
-isni. Strangely enough, the mystic poet can 
hardly ever suggest moral evil save by the 
physically disgusting, outgoing as he does 
the horrors of Dante's hell by his laboured 
.'pictures of the merely beastly. Here he fol- 
■lowed the lead of Ariosto, but with far more 
resort to crudely materialistic devices. It is 
an error of minimization to speak of " the 
Blatant Beast " in the Faerie Queene. There 
are half a dozen beasts in the story, all of the 
same brand. 

All this was part of the penalty of adher- 
ence to the medieval device of allegory and 
the Italian machinery of knights-errant, 
dragons, enchanters, and enchantresses. As 
the knights had to be brave, the witches had 
to be fundamentally vile, and the dragons 
loathsome. In Spenser's case the syncretic 
result is a long poem without unity, an eked- 
out string of similar episodes without vital 
connexion, a procession of personages dis- 
tinguishable only as good and bad, fair and 
foul, brave and craven. His imitations of 
the female warriors of Ariosto and Tasso are 
at least as unconvincing as the originals ; 
and his moral lessons are no more impressive 
' than theirs. It was the aesthetic fallacy of 
that age to hold by the didactic view of all 
art ; and to think that all shortcomings in 
', workmanship were salved by an obtrusive 
moral commentary. Harington, translating 



SPENSER 77 

and commenting Ariosto (1591) and Fairfax, 
translating and introducing Tasso (1600), 
clang moral symbols and rattle mechanisms 
of allegory that might conceivably serve to 
scare off all save celibate pedagogues. All 
round, the pseudo-historical personages are 
much less recognizably human than the Zeus 
and Hera of Homer, or the Satan of Milton : 
the portrayal of discernible characters was 
to come in only with the new English drama. 
Spenser was too fanatically malicious to make 
of Mary Queen of Scots anything but a loathly 
sorceress ; and his ideal knights may as well 
be identified with any one Elizabethan as 
with any other, since they portray none. It 
is a decisive testimony to his power in other 
regards that his pageant of unrealities could 
go on attracting readers alongside of the 
living " pell-mell of Shakespeare's men and 
women." 

And still we return to Spenser as to the 
gracious colour-work of Old Masters whose 
picture-themes have ceased to concern us. 
His art, it is true, incurs risks from which 
theirs is exempt. The specific sin of the art 
of words is verbiage ; and Spenser's stanza 
sins in that kind with a heedlessness hard to 
forgive. The great poem often suggests a 
dredging machine which with equal facility 
pours forth gold, diamonds, and mud, as 
being bound to keep going, whatever be the 
material, forthcoming. No other great poet 



78 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

has produced so many lines of doggerel, 
so much unashamed line-padding. All that 
must just be accepted as a by-product of the 
gold and the gems. It cannot be that he did 
not realize the varying quality of his output. 
Four times over, in different works, he new- 
minted the lines : » 

Upon her eyeKds many graces sate 
Under the shadow of her even brows. 

When he wrote : 

And ever and anon the rosy red 
Flashed through her face 

(F, Q, III, ii, 6), 

he was but hitting the best of several phrases, 
of which one runs : 

And ever and anon with rosy red 
The bashful blood her snowy cheeks did dye 

(II, ix, 41). 

He loved thus to jewel his long-drawn tapestry 
with pearls great and small. We seem to 
see him looking up at his audience for their 
approving glance, joying in his melody. 
And where he did not repeat, others did for 
him. Instantly after the issue of the first 
three cantos, Marlowe in the printed Tambur- 
laine chants over again the melody of the 
lines : 

Like to an almond-tree ymounted high 
On top of green Selinis all alone. 



SPENSER 79 

With blossoms brave bedecked daintily ; 
Whose tender locks do tremble every one 
At every little breath that under heaven is blown 

{F, Q. I, vii, 32). 

Peele in David and Bethsdbe repeats with 
hardly a change the dancing carol : 

At last, the golden Oriental gate 
Of greatest heaven 'gan to open fair. 

And Phcebus, fresh as bridegroom to his mate. 
Came dancing forth, shaking his dewy hair. 
And hurled his glistring beams through gloomy air. 

{F, Q, I, V, 2). 

And Greene or Peele in Locrine, and Greene 
or Marlowe in Selimus — ^two early plays of 
the Marlowe school — echo a number of lines, 
passages, and phrases. The inspirer of all 
this chorus knew as well as any one when he 
had written beautifully : he must have been 
nearly as well aware when he produced rela- 
tive commonplace and padding. We can but 
infer that for Spenser the didactic view of 
poetry served as an anaesthetic to the artistic 
sense. To regard the main aim of a poem 
as moral instruction was to conceive of beauty 
of workmanship as an embellishment rather 
than an essential. In the View of the Present 
State of Ireland, Spenser's own representative 
in the dialogue speaks of having had some of 
the native poems translated for him, and pro- 
nounces that *' surely they savoured of sweet 
wit and good invention ; but skilled not of 
the goodly ornaments of poetry ; yet were 



80 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

they sprinkled with some pretty flowers of 
their own natural device." Evidently he 
would not have assented to Arnold's view of 
poetry as something to be evolved in the 
sheer exposixion of a great theme or action : 
it was for him rather a jewelling of the text. 
Such a conception of his art permitted of 
much prosaic statement and diffuse diction 
to which " ornament " was to be a relief. 
What can always be counted on in Spenser 
is fluency and perfect scansion : dignity of 
purport and diction is in comparison pre- 
carious. But in one respect Spenser is almost 
unfailingly poetical. His prevailing bias is 
to the elegiac : " sad " is his favourite adjec- 
tive ; and at well nigh every opportunity he 
raises reverie to a grave music. His poetry 
thus resembles in its efiects those of the pre- 
Wagnerian forms of opera in which much of 
the progress of the action was made in 
largely uninspired recitative, which rose from 
time to time into tuneful aria. For instance, 
in the first canto of the fourth book, resuming 
the interrupted task, we set out in rather 
unpromising fashion with the customary cap- 
tive maiden and fighting virgin and " jolly 
knight " ; and in due course the rescued 
maid and the rescuer meet two knights 
accompanied by the false Duessa and At6, 
in whom. 

Under mask of beauty and good grace. 
Vile treason and foul falsehood hidden were. 



SPENSER 81 

Then comes the description of the home of 
Ate, " mother of debate," and out of the 
pedestrian pace of the narrative the aria 
rises, pure and fine : 

And all within, the riven walls were hung 
With ragged monuments of times forepast. 
All which the sad effects of discord sung : 
There were rent robes and broken sceptres placed. 
Altars defiled, and holy things defaced ; 
Disshivered spears, and shields ytorn in twain ; 
Great cities ransackt, and strong castles rased ; 
Nations captived, and huge armies slain : 
Of all which ruins there some rehcs did remain. 

There was the sign of antique Babylon ; 
Of fatal Thebes ; of Rome that reigned long ; 
Of sacred Salem ; and sad Ilion, 
For memory of which on high there hong 
The Golden Apple, cause of all their wrong. 
For which the three fair Goddesses did strive : 
There also was the name of Nimrod strong, 
Of Alexander, and his princes five 
Which shar'd to them the spoils that he had got 
alive. 

Lingeringly the strain dwells on " old, un- 
happy far-off things," recalling the themes 
of the poet's earlier translations from Bellay, 
and musically delaying the inevitable moral 
lesson and the unpleasant picture ; till through 
these we revert to the ding-dong of the com- 
bating knights, banging spear on shield, and 
the wonted machinery of hags and enchant- 
resses. 

It is for these springing foiuitains of song 

6 



82 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

in the wilderness of allegory that we roam 
with Spenser's wandering knights and squires 
and maidens through " antres vast and 
deserts idL," with tneir ever-renewed mirage 
of symbolism. At the close, after an eager 
return to his old pastoral plane, he rises to a 
dim height of cosmic reverie, in which the 
whole dream-world is dissolved. 

And Nature's self did vanish, whither no man wist. 

The plan is uncompleted : the eighth canto 
is but begun ; and there were to have been 
twenty-four. But the poem ends there as 
well as it ever could. And the closing strain, 
one thinks, cannot but have been in Shake- 
speare's thought when he penned the mightier 
lines on the ultimate transmutation of " the 
great globe itself," that should leave " not 
a wrack behind " — anticipating in poetic 
ecstasy, with his fellow immortal, the remotest 
vision of the prophetic science of a later day. 

Thus, starting as he did from the didactic 
standpoint of his age, acclaiming the aim and 
matter of the moralizing historical poets, he 
rose above their level no less in his poetic 
reverie than in his command of beauty ; but 
he remained for his age above all things a 
moral poet. For Milton he was " our sage 
and serious poet," " a better teacher than 
Scotus or Aquinas " — as well as a master in 
phrase and melody ; for Drayton he was 
" grave moral Spenser." Neither these nor 



SPENSER 83 

any of his contemporaries have commented 
on the curious fact that the great singer has 
not given us one song, in the ordinary sense 
of the term. " The woods were full of them," 
so to speak ; but he has no woodnote wild, 
such as Milton heard in Shakespeare, no song 
for sheer singing. Though the Epithalamion 
and Prothalamion are in a sense nobly lyrical, 
they are yet reflective, constructive, woven 
harmonies of violins and bassoons, never 
sounding the lyrical cry. There is no " Hark, 
hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings," no 
" Drink to me only with thine eyes," in all 
Spenser. The moral poet needs a text : only 
in virtue of that does he frame his sonnets, 
styled by him " Amoretti." 

In that vein, he is among the best of the 
sonneteers, though he does not surpass the 
finest of Sidney and Drayton, to say nothing 
of Shakespeare, who, somewhat surprisingly, 
excels him alike in fluidity and in distinction 
(though these are qualities of his) no less 
than in the undertones which give depth and 
strength. Spenser's sonnets are pretty much 
in one key, that of rapture, varied only by the 
customary indictment of the cruel fair or 
sigh for the absent one ; and out of the eighty- 
eight it would be hard to cull confidently a 
golden masterpiece ; though the 68th, " Most 
glorious Lord of Life," is well sustained, and 
the 34th and 70th are tuneful in the way of 
the Faerie Queene, What is most surprising 



84 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

in all his work, however, is that the master of 
elegy should in his Astrophel, the dirge for 
the dead and adored Sidney, succeed no better 
than any other performer. It would seem 
that the personal and intimate grief shook and 
stunned the brooding singer, disabling him 
for his characteristic harmonies, and com- 
pelling him to have recourse to conventional 
fantasy and rhetoric. In his dirge in The 
Ruins of Time for the less lovable Leicester, 
Sidney's uncle, he sounds a far more memor- 
able note : 

I saw him die, I saw him die as one 
Of the miean people . . . 

The romantic poet, as was dramatically 
fitting, himself met tragic misfortune, and 
died in a climax of distress which, though 
the misery of the closing scene was doubtless 
exaggerated, moved deeply the culture-class 
of an age that had already pedestalled him. 
His professed purpose of moralizing it had 
perforce come to naught. If his great poem 
had any social influence, it must have been 
rather hardening than otherwise : he did but 
teach his countrymen to hate their neighbours, 
as they were more than ready to do. He 
had none of the kindly ironic humour of 
Ariosto : sardonic satire is his only ap- 
proximation to laughter ; and he learned 
nothing even of Christian cosmopolitanism 
from Tasso. In so far as men are conceivably 



SPENSER 85 

to be made better by moral poetry, the lesson 
was given in that age, if at all, by the artists 
whose work was "drenched in flesh and blood," 
and who could thus in some measure teach 
their fellows to know themselves. Spenser, 
far more highly acclaimed in his day than 
these, had not their power to enlarge men's 
outlook on life. But he gave his countrymen 
of his best, and the gift has ever since been 
cherished. He made for them a manifold 
music ; and to few is it given to render a more 
excellent service. 



CHAPTER V 

THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 

Between the " interlude " of the age of 
Henry VIII and the drama of the closing 
decades of the reign of Elizabeth there is 
a sunderance in species which at a glance tells 
of new departures. The interlude or "mor- 
ality " play is essentially an allegory, and 
typically religious. Bishop Bale, who reveals 
some real dramatic faculty through his di- 
dactic purpose, introduces in his King Johan 
(1548 ?) a historical element which may be 
said to prelude the chronicle play ; but even 
there he works with allegorical as well as 
historical /i^rures, and makes drama out of 



S6 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

abstractions of moral and political and ecclesi- 
astical tendencies and interests. Interludes 
of the old species continued to be produced 
as late as 1580, when Stephen Gosson's Play 
of Plays, otherwise Delight, included the 
characters of Life, Delight, Zeal, Glut, Recrea- 
tion, and Tediousness ; and the device of 
abstraction was employed much later still, 
as in Jonson's Court masques. But already 
in 1580, as Gosson testifies, a multitude of 
story-plays, drawn from Italian and Spanish 
tales, of which Painter's Palace of Pleasure 
is the great storehouse, had been performed 
in the London theatres. These early dramas 
seem to have been written partly in the old 
irregular verse, partly in prose. 

Drama of the " Elizabethan " species begins 
to emerge before rhyme begins to be super- 
seded by blank verse. The Damon and 
Pythias of Richard Edwards (1563) and the 
first Apius and Virginia (1567), a more not- 
able work for its time than the later play of 
Webster on the same theme, have reached the 
plane of character-drama proper ; as have the 
comedy of Ralph Roister-Doister, by Nicholas 
XJdall (1562), and John Still's vigorous farce 
of Gammer Gurton's Needle (circa 1566) ; 
though in the latter the law of farce sub- 
ordinates character to comic action. These 
performances of Edwards, Udall, and Still are 
all in the rough, irregular verse of the inter- 
ludes, a rude metre which represents the 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 87 

decay of the regular Chaucerian verse, with 
its French-sounded final e's, into an English 
line at first capable of no regular scansion 
and only gradually to be raised to strict 
metre. Apius and Virginia represents a 
capable attempt to regularize the old verse 
in keeping with recent progress in non- 
dramatic poetry ; and at the same time to 
give human interest to the play of personality 
alongside of the old abstractions of Conscience, 
Justice, Comfort, Doctrina, Haphazard, and 
Vice, and so on. Damon and Pythias, though 
the work of the "Master of the Children of 
the Chapel " who acted it, is much ruder in 
point of its versification, which is largely 
rough doggerel ; but it is in some important 
respects nearer to drama proper, having dis- 
pensed with allegory and abstraction. The 
prologue explains that the author, by a " sud- 
den change," has turned from a " comical " 
vein of doubtful taste : " and yet," he goes 
on — 

And yet (worshipful audience) thus much I dare 

avouch : 
In comedies the greatest skill is this, rightly to touch 
All things to the quick ; and eke to frame each person 

so 
That by his common talk you may his nature rightly 

know. 
A roister ought not preach : that were too strange to 

hear, 

and so on. Thus we are still in the drama of 



88 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

types, though not in that of abstractions ; and 
the author, obeying the command of Horace — 

In all such kind of exercise decorum to observe — 

presents " matter mix'd with mirth and care," 
to which 

A just name to apply 
As seems most fit we have it termed a tragical comedy. 

His ideal is thus properly dramatic ; though 
in the primitive manner he makes his person- 
ages address the audience as freely as they 
do each other. We are at a stage of transi- 
tion between dramatic moral teaching and 
the reproduction of hfe. 

The starting-point of the typical drama 
of the Shakespearean age is obviously the 
academic Gorboduc, or F err ex and Porrex, of 
Sackville (1561), written in the new regular 
blank verse of Surrey, and constructed on 
the model of the late Latin tragedies of 
Seneca. The interlude is now definitely 
transcended. Here we have presentments of 
personality, of character, of historic action. 
The persons, indeed, are rather abstractions 
of types of action than studies of human 
beings, although the action is quasi-historical ; 
but none the less the historical play and the 
character-play are here in germ ; and we find 
clear traces of the influence of this early model 
in the serious work of the group of poet-play- 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 89 

Wrights of the next generation who immedi- 
ately preceded Shakespeare. And yet the 
most essential principle of the Senecan tragedy, 
here fully present, was entirely set aside later, 
Senecan tragedy follows and impoverishes 
the Greek in its reduction of action to narra- 
tive. On that stage the tragic events are not 
enacted ; they are described and deplored ; 
and the master-characteristic of the later 
Elizabethan drama — continuous vehement 
and tempestuous action — is excluded by the 
law of unity of place and the descriptive 
function of the chorus. In the Jocasta of 
George Gascoigne and his collaborators 
(1566), a free adaptation of an Italian adapta- 
tion of the Phoenissce of Euripides, another 
notable attempt is made to establish classic 
tragedy in English ; but that play, like 
Gorboduc, never got beyond the subsidized 
stage of the universities, the Inns of Court, 
and the Court. The populace would have 
none of them. So with Robert Wilmot's 
tragedy of Tancred and Gismunda, played 
before the Queen at the Inner Temple in 1568, 
and re-written in blank verse of the early style 
of Surrey and Sackville in 1591. The piece, 
" tending only to the exaltation of virtue and 
suppression of vice," is Senecan through and 
through ; as is Thomas Hughes's Misfortunes 
of Arthur (1587), to which several amateurs 
contributed speeches and choruses, and in 
which Bacon helped with the " dumb shows.*' 



90 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Written in scholarly blank verse, but without 
dramatic feeling, such plays had no stage life. 
And here emerges the process of economic 
causation which resulted in the Elizabethan 
drama, commonly so called. 

The vital divergence which took place in 
that age between the drama of England and 
that of France is commonly explained as an 
expression of the divergent minds or tem- 
peraments of the two nations. Englishmen 
are supposed to have demanded one kind of 
art ; and Frenchmen another. But there is 
no good ground for such a theory of human 
nature as is involved in saying that the 
composite population of England could take 
satisfaction only in a dramatic form which 
was repugnant to the equally composite 
population of France. The fact is that the 
French populace never had the chance that 
was offered to the English of determining the 
line of evolution of the literary drama. Of 
natural verve there is abundance in the 
multitudinous old French farce of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, of which Maitre 
Pathelin is the best example. It stands for an 
evolution far in advance of anything reached 
in England till the middle of the sixteenth 
century, though there too there was a good 
deal of simple farce in the Miracle Plays annu- 
ally produced by the trade guilds. It was, in 
fact, the very freedom of action in the French 
popular drama, transgressing all bounds of 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 91 

decency, that made possible the reaction to 
strict classicism in tragedy in the period in 
which Italian influence brought the Sene- 
can tragedy into French favour. The early 
tragedies of the school of Jodelle (1552 on- 
wards) were played in colleges, for scholastic 
audiences, who wanted something totally re- 
moved alike from farce and the popular 
" mystery " plays, which were hardly less 
indecent. About the same period there ap- 
peared " Moralities " of a historical character, 
involving real action ; but political drama 
was a dangerous course in monarchic France, 
and the species could not flourish. 

It was in the same generation that French 
adaptation of Italian comedy set up the plane 
of transition from the old farce to the later 
comedy of Moliere, by way of the interlude of 
Spanish influence at the close of the sixteenth 
century. At this stage the classic convention 
was shaken to the extent of a rejection by 
more than one playwright of the rule of the 
unities of time and place. The most produc- 
tive of these dramatists, Alexandre Hardy, 
who then came to the front, and who is 
reckoned to have written in all some six hun- 
dred plays, was no poet ; and even if he were, 
could not have maintained even a fair level 
of workmanship in such a vast mass of com- 
position. But while leaning in his tragedies 
to the classic tradition, he innovated by sup- 
pressing the chorus, by multiplying scenes and 



92 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

actions, and by curtailing the monologue. 
His enormous production, further, seems to 
have been due to the extreme smallness of his 
pay, which was necessarily affected by the 
heavy taxes levied on the travelling companies 
by the municipalities in name of poor-rate ; 
and by the heavy " free list " in Paris. His 
remuneration in his best days ran from two 
to five crowns ! Most of his plays must have 
been " pieces of occasion " ; yet he has left 
over thirty tragedies, mostly on classical sub- 
jects. Meanwhile, the more literary tragedies 
of the schools of Jodelle and Garnier were the 
monopolies of colleges, and constituted the 
resort of all the respectable people who were 
repelled by the gross indecencies of the still 
prevailing farces. Many of the plays, too, 
were in long sequences or series, running for 
six or eight days — a kind of entertainment 
never meant for the populace, who continued 
to patronize the farces all the more when the 
authorities sought to keep them within bounds 
by administrative measures. 

Finally, the Court, represented by the 
masterful Richelieu, took under its patronage 
the classic tragedy, attracting to that, by 
rewards, poets of much greater culture than 
Hardy ; and a tragic drama which, if left free 
to grow in its own way, might have tran- 
scended Hardy on native lines, was tied down 
to the ill-comprehended law of the unities. 
Rotrou refused to obey, but the combined 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 93 

influence of Richelieu and the Academy which 
he founded and ruled was decisive for Cor- 
neille ; and the form and spirit of French 
tragedy by him established were fixed for two 
hundred years. Classic forms are the outcome 
of previous conditions ; but, once fixed, they 
command allegiance. 

The rapid development of a powerful native 
drama in Elizabethan England can now be 
seen to be due to the different social and 
economic conditions. To begin with, the 
universal practice of running Miracle Plays 
or Mysteries at Eastertide, Whitsuntide, and 
other religious festival-times, set up at once a 
training-ground for actors and a popular pro- 
clivity to things dramatic. On this basis 
proceeded the development of both acting 
and play-making. As early as the reign of 
Henry VIII, it was the fashion for noblemen 
to have companies of players in their occa- 
sional service ; and this practice continued 
throughout the century. The companies of 
players, to begin with, had thus a certain 
economic basis in the patronage of the nobles 
who primarily retained them ; and when they 
played in London they were not " protected " 
as were those of Paris, where one or two com- 
panies held a monopoly under which they prac- 
tically defied the control of the authorities, 
who were always complaining of their licence. 
In 1583 the Queen set up a company of her 
own ; but that had no special immunities. 



94 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

The London theatre about this period seems 
to have been coarse enough ; but freedom, 
as always, was in the end favourable to 
decency, a certain standard being set up in 
the effort to appeal to all classes. We get a 
fair notion of the kind of comedy in vogue 
from Fedele and Fortunio : the two Italian 
Gentlemen, translated by Thomas Hackett 
from the Italian of Luigi Pasqualigo, and 
printed in 1584. Here the staple verse is the 
old " fourteener," still written in large part 
with the most heedless irregularity, and gener- 
ally running to doggerel, but variegated with 
perfectly regular dialogue in stanzas, carefully 
executed. The plot is thoroughly Italian, a 
ceaseless bustle of intrigue and deception, 
disguises, tricks, rival lovers, maid and mis- 
tress and go-between, all devoid of character 
interest, save as regards the established types 
of the Pedant and the bombastic soldier. 
The latter receives the English name of Cap- 
tain Crackstone ; but the others are all 
Italians, as was to be the rule on the English 
stage for two generations. It was in fact, 
despite the lead of Edwards, mainly by 
Italian comedy that the lift was given to the 
English theatre out of the methods of the 
morality play, with its abstract personages ; 
and at the outset the new drama is nearer 
farce than comedy, though there are many 
Latin quotations, and the Pedant reads out 
an Italian letter, which he translates. The 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 95 

stage directions show that already there was 
regular music between the acts : " The first 
Act being ended, the Consort of Musique 
soundeth a pleasant Galliard " ; " The third 
Act being ended, the Consort sounds a solemn 
Dump " ; " The fourth Act being ended, the 
Consort soundeth a pleasant Allemaigne " ; 
and so on. Evidently the theatre sought to 
entertain the educated as well as other classes. 
Then, after the semi-popular plays of the 
scholarly Lilly, ranging from rustic comedy to 
quasi-mythological pieces fitted for the Court, 
came the run of historical or " chronicle " 
plays which made the ground for Shakespeare. 
The framing and recasting of these plays, 
which seem first to have been scribbled by 
half-educated actors, became a means of 
hand-to-mouth livelihood for Bohemian uni- 
versity men, who were called upon to write 
for a general audience that did not want 
Senecan tragedy. It was not that English 
scholars were averse to the Senecan model. 
In point of fact, as we have seen, that moael 
had been dutifully welcomed by scholarly 
and semi-scholarly poets ; it had the respect- 
able suffrages to such an extent that it in- 
fluenced even the popular stage ; and as late 
as the last decade of Elizabeth's reign trans- 
lations from the French tragedies of Garnier 
were published by Thomas Kyd, a popular 
playwright on native lines, and by the poet 
Samuel Daniel, under the influence of the 



96 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

classic bias fostered by Sidney, and after his 
death by his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. 
A distinct Senecan influence indeed marks the 
work of Kyd, Greene, and Peele. But the 
living drama rose out of the " effective de- 
mand " of the populace for a kind of play 
suited to its taste and capacity ; and in the 
liberty to meet that demand lay the secret 
of the English evolution. The actors must 
have audiences ; and the playwrights had to 
cater for their requirements, to the extent even 
of mixing farce with history and tragedy. 
Many plays, in rhyme and in prose, had been 
produced under those conditions by men of 
small culture : it was the need to draw 
educated as well as uneducated spectators, to 
please alternately the Court and the commons, 
that led to the enlistment of educated men, 
capable of producing dignified and sonorous 
poetry. From first to last, the economic 
factor counts. 

In the lives of Kyd, Peele, Greene, and 
Marlowe we see how the economic demand 
operated. The companies which played in 
the early London theatres, notably the Queen's, 
the Chamberlain's, and the Admiral's, sought 
from the playwrights new plays suited to the 
popular stage ; and between the theatrical 
demand for interesting action and the literary 
preparation of the scholar-playwrights there 
was evolved the blank- verse drama of vigorous 
changing action, freed from the cramping 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 97 

unities of time and place, and marked by a 
blending or alternation of serious and comic 
scenes. The academic training meant a 
resort to verse ; and after the notable success 
of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Marlowe's 
Tamburlame, the value of the freedom of 
blank verse was felt to be proved. Most of 
the plays produced before 1585 have dis- 
appeared ; but we know from the censures 
of Sidney in his Defence of Poetry^ and from 
those of Whetstone in the preface to his Promos 
and Cassandra (the basis of Shakespeare's 
Measure for Measure), that a reckless dis- 
regard of the unities was a common feature. 
Audiences were to be w^on by the human 
interest in a personage who appeared to them 
first as a child, then grew up and won fame 
and fortune by adventures in foreign lands. 
The old machinery of princesses, enchanters 
and dragons was freely employed, simply 
because it was popular ; and scenes of clown- 
ing were common simply because the audiences 
would have them, as they and their fathers 
before them had been wont to do in the old 
Miracle Plays and Mysteries. Above all, 
actors wanted speeches which they could 
deliver with some effect of reality : and the 
two arts, the mimetic and the poetic, in- 
evitably reacted on each other. 

One scholarly dramatist intervened who 
did not take what was to be the beaten path. 
John Lilly or Lyly, after making his f ashion- 

7 



98 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

able success in didactic and "stylistic" prose 
fiction with his two Ewphues books in 1579 
and 1580, abandoned for ever that style of 
writing, and became a maker of "Court" 
comedies. In this walk too he met with 
success, though, writing as he did for the 
companies of child-actors of St. Paul's School, 
of which he was vice-master, he could not 
hope to secure great theatrical effects, and 
did not seek to do so. In only one play. The 
Woman in the Moon, did he essay blank- 
verse ; and in only one other. Mother Bombie, 
did he deal with English life ; all the rest 
being on mythological themes, though with 
a variety of contemporary applications. The 
children of Chapel Royal played several of 
his plays. Endymion is an elaborate glorifica- 
tion of the Queen, and other Court person- 
ages are supposed to be indicated in that 
and others of his pieces ; but he never won 
favour enough to secure the preferment for 
which he longed : and if the Pandora of the 
Woman in the Moon were taken, as it appar- 
ently must have been, for Elizabeth, his ill- 
fortune is not hard to understand. If it was 
his revenge for non-fulfilment of Court pro- 
mises, it was a fatal one. For the second 
time — offence having been previously given 
by the veiled politics of Midas — the children 
of Paul's were inhibited from playing ; and 
Lilly withdrew to his " cell " of retirement, 
and to the poverty which fell upon most of 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 99 

the playwrights of the age. " Our pleasant 
Willy, ah, is dead of late," wrote Spenser 
in his Tears of the Muses (1590) — almost cer- 
tainly referring to our dramatist. His work 
was done. It undoubtedly affected other 
men's method in comedy, including Shake- 
speare's : the Sir Tophas of Endymion gave 
hints for Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff ; and 
the Euphuistic dialogue of this and others of 
his seven pieces is clearly reflected in the 
Shakespearean and other comedy which fol- 
lowed. But the whole set remain, like 
Euphues, things of their period, products of 
clever workmanship that always falls short 
of genius, though always original in their 
way. The tragedy which was the highest 
reach of his generation Lilly never essayed. 

That grew out of older and more deeply 
rooted forms. Thomas Kyd's Spanish 
Tragedy, an early " classic," first played per- 
haps about 1585, tells already of a consider- 
able evolution. It borrows from Senecan 
tragedy the idea of a series of revenges and 
retributions, and the machinery of an aveng- 
ing ghost. But the plot, the marshalling of 
a bustling and stirring series of events, keeping 
the spectator's interest on tension, is the 
outcome of the English conditions. In one 
scene two lovers exchange amorous talk, and 
the man is seized and hanged before the 
woman's eyes — a thing impossible on the 
classic stage of France. The bereaved father 



100 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

and mother pass through long-drawn griefs 
and frenzies which demand from the actors 
all that their mimetic art could do ; and 
the ultimate revenge on all the wrongers 
is accomplished by a complex machinery of 
stratagem which would hold a simple-minded 
audience breathless. An exciting series of 
events is the first requisite : poetic declama- 
tion is the spontaneous contribution of the 
dramatist, reared on Seneca and on Senecan 
styles. 

From such beginnings the blank-verse 
drama climbed within a dozen years to the 
music and the magic of The Merchant of 
Venice ; and in a few years more to the 
storm-swept heights of Othello and Lear, 
Nothing is more remarkable in that age of 
leaping growth than the rapid development 
of nearly all of the more active practitioners. 
Kyd's Spanish Tragedy has little in the 
nature of individual characterization : the 
bereaved father Hieronimo is rather a rhe- 
torical type than a person ; and the heroine, 
Bellimperia, is hardly more than a plot-per- 
sonage ; though the villains, who in some 
scenes are perhaps supplied by another hand, 
are vigorously drawn. But if, as is now sub- 
stantially certain, Kyd wrote Arden of Fevers- 
ham (1592), he had in a few years acquired 
the power of putting in lifelike action real 
men and women, villains drawn from actual 
observation, tragedy that grows out of every- 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 101 

day life, actual contemporary character, 
passion, and crime. So simply strong is that 
work as a whole that many critics, disregard- 
ing the profound differences of verse technique 
and verbal art, have ascribed the play to 
Shakespeare, as being alone capable of such 
power of portraiture. And, indeed, the pro- 
duction of such a piece by Kyd might have 
seemed impossible if we had not the indispu- 
table cases of Marlowe and Greene, whose 
swift rise from crude to relatively ripe art is 
in its way as signal as the progression of 
Shakespeare from Venus and Adonis to 
Antony and Cleopatra, 

The advent of Marlowe in the drama is 
somewhat like the portent of his Tamhurlaine 
in the field of history. At one stroke a new 
and exorbitant energy makes a clean sweep 
of existing conventions, and barbaric force 
drives its path athwart the overthrown pre- 
tensions of all who had held the ground. 
As one who sounds a trumpet, he tells his 
audience that he calls them away from " jig- 
ging veins of rhyming mother- wits " and 
leads them to " the stately tent of war." It 
is less a play than a pageant of strife, slaugh- 
ter, and victory, in wh^ch the strxding con- 
queror, " in high astounding terms," pro- 
claims the progress of his ruthless triumph 
over the kingdoms of the world. Such a 
picture of savage megalomania had never 
before been staged ; such thunderous force 



102 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

of rhythmic phrase had never yet been found 
possible in any modern language. And it is 
the spontaneous primary utterance of the 
poet's own mastering dream of greatness. In 
a famous passage of Tamhurlaine he sings the 
rapture of the quest of the impossible : 

If all the pens that ever poets held 
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts. 
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts. 
Their minds and muses on admired themes ; 
If all the heavenly quintessence they 'stil 
From their immortal flowers of poesy. 
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
The highest reaches of a human wit ; 
If these had made one poem's period 
And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness. 
Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least. 
Which into words no virtue could digest. 

How, we are moved to ask — how came such 
a golden strain to soar from the brazen 
orchestra that thunders forth the fierce tale of 
the Scythian war-lord ? The answer is that 
the poetry and the dramaturgy express but 
phases of the same psychosis. It was even 
such a passion for the utmost things that 
carried Marlowe in a few crowded years from 
the clangours of Tamhurlaine to the far more 
complex and intellectual presentment of ex- 
orbitant ambitions in the Jew of Malta and 
Doctor Faustus. Barabas compasses bound- 
less wealth — pictured with all Marlowe's 
burning splendour of verbal colour — and seeks 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 103 

to wreak without limit his lawless and 
malignant will : Faustus, finding no rest in 
the heaping-up of all science, " still climbing 
after knowledge infinite," as Tamburlaine 
before, will compass at any cost the utmost 
scope of human desire, and naught less than 
Helen's self shall content him. 

In the no less original historical play of 
Edward II, partly disfigured as it is, like 
Faustus, by the additions and perversions 
of alien hands, we find portrayed the same 
intense stresses of will, with the same dramatic 
counterplay of fate, destroying the wild 
egotist whom the gods had made mad. For 
Marlowe was no mere singer of the Superman, 
no mere mouthpiece of self-asserting passion. 
His dramas are wholes, planned for their 
climax and catastrophe : that of the ruth- 
less, all-grasping Tamburlaine, the " fiery 
thirster after sovereignty," laid low by mere 
inevitable death ; that of the demoniacal 
Jew shattered at length by the moral play 
of normal mundane forces ; that of the insati- 
able Faustus paying his supernatural penalty ; 
that of the vicious and ungovernable king 
brought to humiliation and death by his own 
frowardness. Pitiful as was his end, slain 
in a low tavern brawl, the framer of these 
dramas was something more than a flute of 
wild emotion, "fit to write passions for the 
souls below." He was more than audacious 
in his freethinking, and he seems to have 



104 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

been strangeiy wild in his talk : but there 
lay in him the seed of the sanity of true 
genius ; and had he been granted but an- 
other decade, he might, despite his serious 
lack of humour, have left us something of 
Olympian mastery, the fruition of the Titanic 
power that was struck down when he had 
but attained the age at which Shakespeare 
produced Venus and Adonis. His epitaph 
is for ever that of his own lines : 

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight. 

And burned is Apollo's laurel bough 

That sometime grew within this learned man. 

Two university men of the day, Robert 
Greene the novelist and George Peele the 
poet, were at once fascinated by Marlowe, 
copying him, from the moment of his appear- 
ance, in vocabulary, style, and theme ; and 
Kyd was no less magnetized. Greene, with 
much less of original creative power, found in 
drama, where he followed Marlowe's lead, a 
path to achievement such as he evidently 
could not have reached in his tediously fluent 
prose tales. His two early plays, Orlando 
Furioso and Alphonsus King of Arragon, are 
so much facile but uninspired pot-boiling ; 
but when he followed Marlowe's Faustus with 
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay he revealed a 
power which Marlowe had not shown, that 
of presenting a recognizably real woman, ten- 
der and true, the moral superior of the men 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 105 

around her ; and in King James the Fourth, 
Queen Dorothea, named after the poet's 
own wronged and forgiving wife, forecasts the 
noblest types of womanhood in Shakespeare. 
It is this special power of perception and pre- 
sentment in Greene that makes him quite 
conceivably the author of the unsigned play 
Edward III, of which the second act is so 
remarkable for its dramatic power that, like 
Arden of Fever sham, it has been conjecturally 
assigned by many critics to Shakespeare. 
But the style is not Shakespeare's, though he 
copied two of the lines in his Sonnets ; and 
the situation of the tempter-king and the 
virtuous woman is one which Greene had 
handled half-a-dozen times in his signed tales 
and plays, notably in James IV, 

If Edward III be his, he is at least as 
likely as Marlowe to have written the anony- \ 
mous Selimus, a reflex of Tamhurlaine, com- ^ 
pounded of much rant and not a little power- 
ful Marlowesque propaganda in what was 
then supposed to be the spirit of Machiavelli. 
The best passages might be Marlowe's own ; 
but whereas the lawless egotists in Marlowe's 
plays always fall, the execrable Selimus re- 
mains unpunished and triumphant. And 
this suggests the hand of Greene, who is 
morally less sane than his great model. His 
heroes, like himself, sin habitually against 
good feeling even when they are not pre- 
sented as defiers of moral law ; and the 



106 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

account he has given of himself in his death- 
bed performance, A Groatsworth of Wit bought 
with a Million of Repentance (1592), presents 
a character vicious in grain as well as in life. 
Yet it was his hand that first put upon the 
Elizabethan stage the figures of admirable 
women " nobly planned," fountains of good- 
ness in an evil world, idealized, of course, yet 
more real than the men about them. Women 
of the contrary type, of whom he had met 
many, he hardly ever brings upon his scene. 

But Greene's importance in the Elizabethan 
drama is not fully to be measured by his 
signed plays. It is proved by several testi- 
monies tnat he wrote many more than the 
half-dozen now printed as his. Nashe tells 
that he was " chief agent for the [Queen's] 
company " of players, and " writ more than 
four other " ; Chettle declared that he was in 
his time " the only comedian of a vulgar 
[= popular] writer in this country " ; and an 
admirer, with the initials R. B., claimed in 
15i,4i that 

the men that so eclipsed his fame 
Purloined his plumes : can they deny the same ? 

Nashe further pronounces that in " plotting 
plays " he was " his craft's master." All 
this tells not only of a wide vogue, but of a 
probable survival in some form of Greene's 
" purloined " work. As the Queen's company, 
which broke up at the end of 1591, had been 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 107 

managed by Richard Burbage, who was after- 
wards one of the partners with Shakespeare 
in the Lord Chamberlain's, it seems highly- 
probable that a number of Greene's comedies 
passed into the repertory of the latter, and were 
freshly adapted or re-written for it by its 
rising dramatist, the young Shakespeare. 
How far the debt extended we cannot tell ; 
but debt there surely was, 

George Peele, the first in order of advent, 
but not in importance, of the group of uni- 
versity men who as playwrights cleared the 
ground for Shakespeare, has left nothing so 
fine as Greene's best work, and nothing so 
powerful as Marlowe's. There is something of 
poetry in his slight Old Wive^s Tale, and some- 
thing of idyllic grace in his early pastoral. 
The Arraignment of Paris (1584) ; but his 
elaborate David and Bethsahe is rather a 
rhetorical exercise in play form than a creative 
drama. He has little command of the living 
voice, and seems most at home in writing 
patriotic or courtly " occasional " verse, 
though that too is generally laboured. His 
Edward I is the most unpleasant of all the 
many chronicle-plays of the time ; and his 
Battle of Alcazar — which like Tamhurlaine 
yielded an absurd passage of which the young 
Shakespeare made fun — has no line in itself 
memorable. His surest title to commemora- 
tion is that he shared with Greene and 
Marlowe and other dramatists in the compo- 



108 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

sition of one or other of certain plays which, 
being acquired by Shakespeare's company 
and in some cases more or less fully revised 
by him, have come down to us bearing the 
master's name — ^to wit. King John, Henry V, 
the Henry VI trilogy, Richard III, and, it 
may even be, Richard II. Peele, further, 
certainly had a main hand in Titus Andro- 
nicus, where Shakespeare's hand cannot at all 
be traced with confidence ; and he was prob- 
ably one of the first draughtsmen of Romeo 
and Juliet, where the " gallop apace " speech 
still hints of his phraseology — and his taste. 
The novelist Thomas Lodge, ostensibly the 
least theatrically productive of the four 
scholars of the Marlowe-Greene group, is the 
most elusive. We have from him only one 
complete signed play, Marius and Sylla ; or, 
The Wounds of Civil War, probably written 
about 1588, published in 1594 ; and one com- 
posite signed play, the Looking Glass for 
London, in which (about 1590) he collaborated 
with Greene ; but it is nearly certain that 
he shared in other pieces. The Troublesome 
Raigne of King John, published in 1591, has 
a number of his favourite phrases and peculiar 
words ; and its whole versification closely 
resembles that of the Wounds. As to life, 
he was on the whole the most fortunate, 
though he, like the rest, underwent many hard- 
ships. Getting a medical degree at Avignon 
in 1596, he followecl serious courses, publish- 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 109 

ing a translation of Josephus in 1602, a Treatise 
of the Plague in 1603, and a translation of 
Seneca in 1614 ; and lived till 1625, having 
long survived the Bohemian playwright- 
comrades of his youth. 

On the strength of his signed dramatic 
work he counts for little ; but if he were the 
author of the Troublesome Raigne, and also, 
as there is some reason to think, joint author 
with Kyd of the old King Leir and his Three 
Daughters, written between 1592 and 1594 ; 
and still more if he be the author of A Warning 
for Fair Women, he played an important part 
in the rapid evolution which we have already 
in part followed. Marius and Sylla is strenu- 
ously monotonous in key, and in diction 
Marlowesque, rhetorical, conventional, in- 
clining more to the French than to the native 
models ; while its comic scenes are gross 
anachronisms. The Looking Glass, again, is 
withheld by its pseudo-Biblical framework 
from homogeneous truth. But the Trouble- 
some Raigne has plenty of primitive vigour ; 
King Leir, albeit utterly transcended by 
Shakespeare's entirely individual handling of 
the same theme, is no mean prelude to that ; 
and the Warning for Fair Women (1594 or 
later) is only less notable as an essay in 
realism than Arden, which indeed it so re- 
sembles in theme as to raise question whether 
it be not from the same hand. 

Upon many such questions of authorship 



110 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

we are still in uncertainty, and there has been 
much futile guess-work ; but the method of 
critical analysis which definitely assigns Arden 
to Kyd will probably one day clear up many 
other problems. Of the Warning, and of 
another play which has been conjecturally 
connected with Lodge, the ^Larum for London 
(1599), we can but say that they show the 
same progression from conventional to crea- 
tive art, from pseudo-classicism to realism, 
as is to be noted in the work of Marlowe, Kyd, 
and Greene. The Warning is written in simple 
and mostly pedestrian blank verse, taking the 
way of Kyd, and presenting a tragedy of lust 
and crime on the levels of London bourgeois 
life, closely following, as does Arden, the re- 
cords of an actual murder trial. The Induc- 
tion, which suggests another hand, is a protest 
against the tragedy of slaughterous tyrants 
and avenging ghosts, very much in the spirit 
of Jonson's Prologue to his Every Man in his 
Humour, produced in the previous year. " I 
must have passions that must move the soul," 
says Tragedy, whipping History and Comedy 
off the stage ; and the cold, hard tale of vicious 
folly, craft, and murder goes deliberately 
on to the finale of retribution. The action 
aims at producing illusion by rigorous veri- 
similitude of detail. Such plays could give 
small pretext for the charge of immorality 
against the stage : sin is tracked and doomed 
with the grimmest moral purpose ; and tales 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 111 

were told in this connexion — as in Hamlet — 
of how guilty creatures before such spectacles 
were driven to confession and the payment 
of the last penalty. Shakespeare, always a 
poet, was not to take the realistic way in 
tragedy ; but such plays as this, written for 
his company, influenced him in his work ; 
and verbal echoes of the Warnings in which he 
may actually have played, occur in Macbeth, 

The ^Larum for London, by whomsoever 
written, shows rather more poetic power than 
any other play ascribed to Lodge ; and it is 
impossible to be sure that the vigorous verse 
is not in part from the hand of Marlo^^^e, 
which, if not present, is certainly imitated. 
The " moral " of the play, the need for proper 
provision for men who have served their 
country as soldiers, is one affirmed by him ; 
and the siege of Antwerp, which the play pre- 
sents, is one which we know to have interested 
him. 

Little of the other surviving work of the 
group of pre-Shakespeareans remains memor- 
able ; but to that group we must assign 
the important credit of having evolved the 
chronicle-play, in the revision and adaptation 
of which Shakespeare did some of his first 
dramatic task- work. The three plays on the 
reign of Henry VI, published with his in 1623, 
are certainly but adaptations of previous 
plays in which Marlowe, Peele, and Greene, 
and possibly Kyd, Drayton, and Lodge, coUa- 



112 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

borated ; and 1 Henry VI seems to be mainly 
the work of the first three, with, it would seem, 
additions by Drayton. The opening lines 
have the sign manual of Marlowe. One 
eminent authority has inclined to assign to 
Shakespeare the " Roses " scene, and another 
the Talbot scenes in the fourth act. But the 
Roses scene, with its notably high percentage 
of verses with double-endings, is much more 
likely to have been the late work of Marlowe ; 
and the Talbot scenes carry no suggestion of 
the style of Shakespeare, though we cannot 
tell how far he may have intervened as reviser. 
An alternative hypothesis assigns the Talbot 
scenes to Drayton — a much more likely solu- 
tion. The odious presentment of Joan of 
Arc cannot conceivably be Shakespeare's, but 
it is only too likely to be Peele's ; and Mar- 
garet, in this and the later plays, often sug- 
gests the hand of Greene. In Richard III 
there appears to be much of the work of Mar- 
lowe and Greene, with notable verbal traces 
of Kyd ; and the crude vigour of Richard's 
self-description belongs to Marlowe alike in 
style and conception. This play we know 
exhibits a multitude of divergences as between 
the Quarto of 1597 and the Folio of 1623 ; 
but there are insuperable objections to the 
view that the differences in the later version, 
even when they are improvements, stand for 
corrections made by Shakespeare. They are 
often demonstrably the work of one who had 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 113 

not understood the original text ; and the 
long passages in the Folio which are lacking 
in the Quarto are evidently not additions but 
portions of the prior text which had been 
excluded from an acting copy by way of stage 
curtailment. With these restored, the Quarto 
gives substantially the true text, and it can- 
not be all Shakespeare's. It is not credible 
that he made the ghost of Henry VI say to 
Richard : 

When I was mortal, ray anointed body 
By thee was punched full of deadly holes. 

Even in Henry V there is some ground for 
misgiving as to authorship. The foolish line : 

Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide, 

if it be Shakespeare's, is the worst he ever 
wrote; and inasmuch as the choruses are 
noticeably unlike his style, but, like the 
admittedly non- Shakespearean prologue to 
Troilus and Cressida, closely resemble that of 
the prologues of Dekker, it may be that in 
this play also we have some work of other 
men. It would be satisfactory to be able to 
believe as much with regard to the gross 
savagery of Henry's speech in Act III, Scene 3. 
Not the least effective of the old chronicle 
series is The Troublesome Raigne of King 
John, anonymously published in 1591, but 
probably written, as aforesaid, by Thomas 

8 



114 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Lodge. Of all the early model-plays in the 
case of which we are able to compare an 
original with Shakespeare's reworking, this 
best bears the comparison ; and it is pro- 
bably to the inspiration of Marlowe that it owes 
its strongest features. Shakespeare does but 
refine and invigorate the portraiture and the 
plot, removing as he always did the more 
fanatical features. An interesting hint as 
to the procedure of recomposition, however, 
lies in the herald's speeches in the second act. 
In the old play, these are in prose ; in 
Shakespeare's they are in verse ; and the 
verse is clearly not Shakespeare's. Evidently 
there were possibilities of the intervention of 
minor hands. 

The importance of the early chronicle 
p'ays lies not so much in their literary merit, 
which, on the whole, is not high, as in their 
function of effecting the transition from 
academic to what we may term " humanist " 
tragedy. At one end of the evolution comes 
Ferrex and Porrex ; at the other end lie 
Faustus and Othello^ Lear, and Antony and 
Cleopatra. It was by way of the presentment 
of modern historical characters, partly limned 
in the light of recent history, that drama 
moved from pseudo-classic rhetoric and non- 
action to the free play of life, whether of his- 
tory, legend, fiction, or criminal trial. And 
the freedom to do this was part of the gain 
from the clean sweep made in English public 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 115 

life by the rise of the Tudor dynasty and the 
further clearing away of the past at and after 
the Reformation. The personal (not econ- 
nomic) protection given to the player com- 
panies by the nobles who nominally employed 
them, was the remaining requisite for a 
free dramatic handling of history. Had the 
French stage had similar liberty to deal with 
the near historic past it might have evolved 
a more realistic tragedy which should have 
escaped the academic reaction typified in 
Corneille. But the political conditions in 
the two countries were vitally different. In 
both, recent home history was alike taboo ; 
and not till the reign of James could English 
playwrights touch even remotely on the 
tragic record of the ghastly house of Tudor, 
the father with his bloodstained hands, the 
daughters born of mothers dishonoured or 
slain. But plays which gibbeted Richard 
Crookback were pleasant enough to Tudor 
ears ; the fuller treatment of the wars of York 
and Lancaster naturally followed ; patriotic 
and Protestant sentiment in turn welcomed 
the chronicles in which the first and third 
Edwards and Henry V played the hero-king ; 
and even the dubious King John could be 
made to figure as the champion of English 
liberty against the Pope. The anger of the 
Court at the revival of Richard II on the 
occasion of the Essex conspiracy showed the 
danger which might upon occasion attach 



116 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

to the exploitation of history ; but the free 
field was large. In France, the factor of the 
Church alone excluded any such free handling 
of the nation's past : if the people had been 
ready to pedestal Joan of Arc, the Church 
would not have allowed it. 

It would be a great mistake to suppose 
that the mere play of patriotism in England 
was the inspiring force in the vitalizing of the 
serious drama. The chronicle plays, as we 
have seen, were not as a whole great work; 
and what is best in them has least to do with 
patriotism. The notable part of Edward 
III is entirely outside the historic action ; 
the strongest play of all, Edward II, like 
Richard II, presents a humiliated king, of 
whom the nation was ashamed ; and in later 
history the ground is chiefly occupied with 
the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, in 
which the themes are national defeat, regal 
wickedness, and civil war. Patriotic fervour 
is not the inspiration of great drama. What 
the chronicle play really did was to conduct 
the stage by the line of least resistance to 
poetic realism in drama, the distinctive excel- 
lence of Elizabethan literature, which at this 
point is epoch-making for the world. It was 
the chronicle play, represented at nearly its 
moral worst by Peele's Edward I and the 
Pucelle scenes of 1 Henry VI, that made pos- 
sible Romeo and Juliet, of which Peele was 
probably one of the draughtsmen. 



THE PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA 117 

All along, at its best and at its worst alike, 
the growth proceeded under a constant fire 
of social hostility. The Elizabethan age is 
not any more than others to be thought of at 
any time as one of homogeneous national life : 
it was rather a perpetual clash of antagonistic 
forces, Protestant against Catholic, Pres- 
byterian against Prelatist, England against 
Ireland, Court clique against Court clique, 
Puritan and poet against popular playmakers, 
and playwright against playwright. No invec- 
tive was fiercer or more continuous than that 
continuously poured out against all manner 
of stage-plays by pious and other moralists 
down to the period when, under the Common- 
wealth, the theatres were closed. Spenser 
and Sidney in the pre-Shakespearean days gave 
it small welcome ; and Bacon later showed 
it no more favour. Its vitality was thus 
native, alike on the economic and the artistic 
side ; and its leafage was that of the tree 
which grows strong by battling with the winds. 

CHAPTER VI 

THE GREAT PROSE 

Drayton, retrospectively scolding Lilly and 
the Euphuists in his old age, speaks of them as 

Talking of Stones, Stars, Plants, of Fishes, Flies, 
Playing with words and idle similes ; 
As the English Apes and very Zanies be 
Of everything that thoy do hear and see. 



118 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

So imitating his ridiculous tricks. 

They spake and writ, all Hke mere lunatiques. 

And it is to Sidney, " that heroe for numbers 
and for prose," that he gives the credit of 
having " reduced " our tongue from Euphu- 
ism, and 

throughly pae'd our language as to show 
That plenteous English hand in hand might go 
With Greek and Latin. 

The praise seems to be strictly just, though 
Drayton does not go into any detail. 

It was not, however, by his most popular 
work that Sidney did his best service to 
English prose. The famous Arcadia, like 
nearly every other new departure in Tudor 
literature, was produced by a foreign stimu- 
lus : in this case, contact with the old Greek 
romance of Heliodorus, entitled The Ethiopic 
History, Underdown's English version of 
that work was first published about 1569 ; 
and about 1580 Sidney was at work upon his 
own romance. His praise of Heliodorus in 
the Apology for Poetry is proof that he had 
read him ; but the fact might have been 
known from the first chapter of the Arcadia, 
so closely does it imitate the narrative 
method of the ancient novelist. This was not 
the way to attain either vitality in story- 
telling or strength of style ; and the Arcadia, 
with all its artificial charm, exhibits neither. 
The opening sentence has 145 words, the 



THE GREAT PROSE 119 

second 203 ; and both are shambling, shape- 
less, and devoid of balance. Further, they 
are tainted with Euphuism, and with some- 
thing worse : witness the phrases : " Where 
we last (alas that the word last should so long 
last) did gaze " [ ? grace or graze] " our eyes upon 
her ever-flourishing beauty." After this one 
feels that the good sentences are windfalls ; 
and that the writer, however gifted, was on 
this side immature. 

Nor does Sidney show any original faculty 
for prose — or even a keen eye for normal 
construction — in his portion of the transla- 
tion of the French treatise De la Verite de la 
Religion chrestienne of his friend De Mornay 
— a task which he bega , but had to leave to 
his friend, Arthur Golding, to finish (1587). 
The opening sentence runs : 

Such as make profession to teach us, do say they 
never find less what to say than when the thing which 
they treat of is more manifest and more known of 
itself than all that can be alleged for the setting forth 
thereof. 

It faithfully follows the original. Golding, 
had he had any natural gift, might have 
acquired a prose style from Calvin, many of 
whose volumes he translated into English, 
thereby helping to affect the development of 
English prose anew as it had been affected 
fifty years before by the early Protestant 
controversy. Calvin was a great prose writer : 
the voluble De Mornay was not, and Sidney 



120 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

probably learned little from translating him. 
He was to become a masterly writer by 
following once more his own precept to him- 
self for poetry : " Look in thy heart and 
write." 

It is in the posthumous Apology for Poetry, 
published nine years after his death, that he 
" reduces " English prose from insincerity 
and convention to a masculine simplicity and 
strength. The theme was one on which he 
must already have thought and felt much ; 
and when the brawling Stephen Gosson, re- 
penting of his own unsuccessful work as a 
playwright, published his School of Abuse 
(1579) in denunciation alike of plays and 
poetry, with an unwarranted dedication to 
the young aristocrat who was already writing 
sonnets to Stella, the inscription was unwel- 
come. Sidney let two years pass before writ- 
ing his essay, variously entitled a Defence 
of Poesy and an Apology for Poetrie ; and 
the result of his deliberation was the most 
finished and distinguished piece of " literary " 
prose that had yet been produced in English. 
Here there is none of the nervous haste and 
loquacity of the Arcadia : the essay begins, 
as it ends, on a note of quiet humour : the 
sentences, with rare exceptions, are at once 
fluent and controlled, easeful and balanced ; 
the construction close, and the diction pure. 
Above all, the thought is fresh, and vital even 
where it is not scientifically valid. The bane 



THE GREAT PROSE 121 

of serious secular literature thus far had 
been platitude : only in 1580 had Montaigne's 
Essais begun the modern era of untrammelled 
" criticism of life " ; and English readers, not 
surfeited with Euphues, were still capable of 
assimilating repeated issues of translations of 
the Golden Epistles (1575, 1582) and the 
Familiar Epistles (1574) of the interminable 
Guevara. It was a new experience for them, 
even in 1595, to meet in their own tongue 
with such prose and such thinking as this of 
Sidney's : 

The Physician weigheth the nature of a man's body, 
and the nature of things helpful or hurtful unto it. 
And the Metaphysick [= metaphysician], though it be 
in the second and abstract notions, and therefore be 
counted supernatural, yet doth he build upon the 
depth of Nature : only the Poet, disdaining to be tied 
to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of 
his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, 
in making things either better than Nature bringeth 
forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in 
Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods and Cyclops, 
Chimeras, Furies, and such like : so as he goeth hand 
in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow 
warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within 
the Zodiac of his own wit. 

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry 
as divers Poets have done ; neither with pleasant 
rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor 
whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth 
more lovely. Her world is brazen : the Poets only 
deliver a golden. . . . 

This is greater prose than anything in the 



122 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Arcadia : greater literature than most of 
Sidney's verse. And it conies to print in the 
great decade of EUzabethan prose. 

The Hterary value of Sidney's Apology is 
best realized by comparing it with the Defence 
of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays previously 
written by Thomas Lodge (1580), in direct 
and controversial reply to Gosson. Lodge 
also was a scholar and a poet, with a notaole 
facility in verse ; but in no respect does his 
performance approach to any rivalry with 
Sidney's. It is written in headlong haste, on 
the first provocation of resentment, and with 
no thought of psychic or logical construction. 
Lodge leaps forth to taunt and counter-rail 
the railer, and does it with all the Elizabethan 
volubility and simplicity of dialectic, largely 
by way of a multitude of queries. " What 
made Africanus esteem Ennius ? Why did 
Alexander give praise to Achilles, but for the 
praises he found written of him in Homer ? 
Why esteemed Pompey so much of Theophanes 
Mitiletus ? or Brutus so greatly the writings 
of Accius ? " He has plenty of learning, and 
is often rapturous in his passion for the 
Muses. " I wish you," he cries, " to account 
well of this heavenly concent, which is full 
of perfection proceeding from above, drawing 
his original from the motion of the stars, from 
the agreement of the planets, from the 
whistling winds, and from all those celestial 
circles where is either perfect agreement or 



THE GREAT PROSE 123 

any Symphonia." But the prose is breath- 
less and the syntax elementary — a mere 
hasty heaping-up of clauses, without composi- 
tion. Lodge, in virtue of his zest and energy, 
figured more or less creditably in a multitude 
of literary forms ; but to the great art of prose 
he contributed nothing. 

It would seem that temperament counted 
for more than literary training. The Apologie 
had been preceded by a briefer and less gra- 
cious, but still a notable masterpiece, lengthily 
entitled A Report of the Truth of the Fight about 
the Isles of the Acores, this last Summer, betwixt 
the Revenge, one of her Majesties Shippes, and 
an Armada of the King of Spaine (1591). 
This was the work of Raleigh, another of the 
masters of prose. It was followed, four years 
later, by a poem from Jervase Markham, The 
Most Honorable Tragedie of Sir Richard 
Grinvile, Knight, written, to use a phrase of 
its author, " with over-labouring toil." The 
poem is in every respect inferior to the prose 
Report, which makes its unique effect by a 
grave and effortless simplicity. Even its long 
sentences keep their balance. The preliminary 
vaunt over the defeat of the Armada, put 
forth by way of retort to Spanish boasts, is 
done with a stern exactness of detail, and with 
hardly a touch of rhetoric ; and the story of 
the tremendous fight of the Revenge is told 
with a calm intensity that transcends declama- 
tion. It is to be feared that there is some 



il24 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

exaggeration in the figures and in the measure 
of the damage to the Revenge, for she re- 
mained navigable ; and the contemporary 
account of Linschoten, who tells of Grenville's 
savageries in the way of chewing glass, speaks 
of only seven or eight Spanish ships as board- 
ing the Englishman. But there is no exag- 
geration in the style : 

All the powder of the Revenge to the last barrel 
was now spent, all her pikes broken, forty of her best 
men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt. In the 
beginning of the fight she had but one hundreth free 
from sickness, and fourscore and ten sick, laid in hold 
upon the ballast. A small troop of men to such a 
ship, and a weak garrison to resist so mighty an army. 
By those hundred all was sustained, the volleys, 
boardings, and entrings of fifteen ships of war, besides 
those which beat her at large. On the contrary, the 
Spanish were always suppUed with soldiers brought 
from every squadron ; all manner of arms, and 
powder at will. Unto ours there remained no comfort 
at all, no hope, no supply either of ships, men, or 
weapons ; the masts all beaten overboard, all her 
tackle cut asunder, her upper work altogether razed ; 
and in effect evened she was with the water — ^but the 
very foxindation or bottom of a ship, nothing being 
left overhead either for flight or defence. 

Markham in comparison is turgid, blatant, 
and sometimes ridiculous : 

But poor Revenge, less rich, and not so great. 
Answered her cuff for cuff, and threat for threat. 

Prose had come into her own. It is note- 
worthy that these prize-pieces are penned by 



THE GREAT PROSE 125 

cultured men of action, who partly found the 
secret of distinction in the school of life, in 
camps and courts. Poets, scholars, fighters, 
thinkers, they made for themselves at length 
a prose fit to affirm their most earnest thought ; 
and Raleigh's Preface to his History of the 
World shows him to have gone as far into 
philosophy as almost any man of his genera- 
tion. Sidney passed away in the splendid 
morning of his life : Raleigh, living through a 
tempestuous day to a tragic night, collects 
himself at the close of his long and generally 
pedestrian prison-task. The History of the 
World, and takes leave of life with a superb 
gesture : 

O eloquent, just and mighty death ! whom none 
could advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none hath 
dared, thou hast done ; and whom all the world hath 
flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and 
despised : thou hast drawn together all the pride, 
cruelty, and ambition of man, and covered it all over 
with these two narrow words. Hie jacet. 

This, like Sidney's, is prose raised to the plane 
of fine art : Raleigh's best verses, among 
which we may rank those on the samt theme, 
have not more gift of duration. Perhaps the 
most truly artistic writing of the same period, 
as it happens, is that produced by one of the 
new tribe of writers who lived by their pens. 
It was drama that first made their way of life 
possible, in England as in Italy ; and it is 
alongside of the Marlowe group that we first 



126 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

find one who puts out most of his effort in 
prose. Nashe had no success in drama ; and 
no real gift for verse ; but in prose he reveals 
a faculty which could stamp distinction upon 
scurrility, and compass beauty of rhythm in 
a treatise penned either for writing's sake or 
for gain. His first essay, The Anatomy of 
jihsurdity (1589), is too strained and breath- 
less to be rhythmical, and is touched with 
Euphuism, though Nashe afterwards denied 
it, protesting that he had never employed the 
vocabulary of stones and beasts. His anti- 
Martinist writings, too, early and late, are 
not enjoyable. But in Fierce Penilesse his 
Supplication to the Divell (1592) he has attained 
at once the command of his rich native humour 
and the singular opulence and elasticity of 
construction in which he surpasses every 
writer of his day. Nashe gives the impres- 
sion of a singer who cannot lose breath. Kis 
clauses are not merely juxtaposed : they are 
interfluent ; and his flow is inexhaustible 
whether he is grave or gay : 

All malcontent sits the greasy son of a clothier, 
and complains (like a decayed earl) of the ruin of 
ancient houses ; whereas the weavers' looms first 
framed the web of his honour, and the locks of wool 
that bushes and brambles have took toll of insolent 
sheep that would needs strive for the wall of a fir- 
bush, have made him of the tenths of their tar a 
squire of low degree ; and of the collections of their 
scatterlings a Justice, tain Marti quam Merourio, of 
Peace and of Coram. 



THE GREAT PROSE 127 

Gabriel Harvey was a good scholar and a 
man of capacity, despite his efforts to per- 
suade Spenser to write English verse in 
quantitative classical measures ; but in his 
wrangles with Nashe he is simply over- 
whelmed by an adversary who could have 
out-railed Thersites and out-rallied Falstaff. 
When Nashe becomes serious his style sub- 
sides to a restful rhythm, which, in the half- 
superstitious, half- whimsical Terrors of the 
Night (1594), anticipates in no small degree 
the perfect cadences of Sir Thomas Browne. 
He is neither thinker nor poet : prose is his 
true medium, and he talks because he must, i 
What he lacks is sufficiency of message. Had 
Nashe ever been possessed by a great pur- 
pose, or cared to pursue sheer beauty of 
diction, he could have made a finer music 
than any of that age. As it is, in his Christs 
Teares over Jerusalem (1593), preaching peni- ^ 
tence in plague-time and professing to put 
craftsmanship far from him, he is instinctively 
harmonious, endlessly fertile in phrase and 
trope. 

But the true Nashe is best to be savoured 
from his Lenten Stu^e, otherwise The Praise " 
of the Red Herring (1599), where the avowed 
business of book-making is conducted with 
a full-handed wealth of humour and fancy 
which constantly recalls the different abun- 
dance of Shakespeare. Critics dwell upon his 
wilful Rabelaisian minting of " huge words," 



128 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

which he brazenly justifies on the score that 
English runs unduly to monosyllables ; but 
that is merely the supererogation of the 
humorist. Over the Red Herring he can 
expatiate as Mercutio on Queen Mab : any 
theme will serve for this prince of improvi- 
sators. As he puts it : 

Every man can say bee to a battledore, and write 
in praise of virtue and the seven liberal sciences, thresh 
com out of the full sheaves and fetch water from the 
Thames ; but out of dry stubble to make an after 
harvest, and a plentiful crop without sowing, and 
wring juice out of a flint, that's Pierce a God's name, 
and the right trick of a workman. 

It is as if Falstaff had taken to earning his 
living by his pen ; with a power of ever- 
springing prose such as Shakespeare did not 
possess. In his ten years of writing for the 
booksellers, living from hand to mouth like 
the wild brotherhood of playmakers with 
whom he mixed, Nashe passed as rapidly and 
as completely from apprenticeship to mastery 
in his mystery as any of them all. His short 
and heedless life was after all spent to some 
purpose. 

Naturally, it was through a very different 
discipline that the great writers of grave prose 
came to their accomplishment. In that field 
the two towering names of those last dozen 
years of Elizabeth's day are those of Hooker 
and Bacon, men alike greatly charged with 
unattainable ideals and endowed with gifts 



THE GREAT PROSE 129 

of utterance commensurate to their purposes. 
In them the rapid intellectual ripening which 
we have noted in so many belletrists of the 
time is revealed in a pregnancy of thought 
which has no parallel in Tudor literature of 
previous generations, with the unique excep- 
tion of More. Down till the last twenty years 
of Elizabeth's life, prose writing, apart from 
theological controversy and chronicle, is in the 
main alternately juvenile and platitudinous, 
even as poetry is experimental or conventional. 
Philosophy in the strict sense could not be 
said to exist in native form ; what ranks as 
moral philosophy was little more than a 
gathering of wise saws and modern instances ; 
and what passed for criticism of life was a more 
or less laboured re-arrangement of old mosaics. 
With Hooker and Bacon the race seems to 
step into maturity ; the faculty of speech 
keeping pace with the faculty of thought. 

Neither indeed was a full-fledged philo- 
sopher in either the ancient or the modern 
sense, both having rather practical than 
speculative ends in view : but ethical and 
political philosophy, deeply meditated, are 
among the great disciplines ; and Hooker, 
brooding over the practically insoluble prob- 
lem of sectarian dissension, attained to a 
grasp of rational social science approached thus 
far by no modern save Bodin. Some of the 
cardinal ideas of Hobbes and Hume are drawn 
from his pages ; and he will be found at points 

9 



130 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

both anticipating Locke and countering in 
advance one of his philosophical makeshifts. 
Such thinking was fit inspiration for high 
prose, given a high ratiocinative purpose ; 
and Hooker, who had visibly read much of 
Calvin as well as of other theology, early and 
late, writes English with a closeness of logical 
texture no less masterly than his management 
of the aesthetic effects of rhythm and cadence. 
Some, doubtless, will always prefer the more 
lyric flights in which his religious tempera- 
ment, which seems to function almost in- 
dependently of the rationalistic, rises to a 
rapturous eloquence. Of this there is a fine 
example at the end of his First Sermon. But 
those who are interested to know how rich 
and powerful Elizabethan prose can be, how 
intellectually satisfying in diction and how 
energetic in idiom, will always turn to the 
Ecclesiastical Polity, The temperaments of 
Hooker and Hobbes had as little in common 
as might be ; but they are peers in their 
perfect Hterary craftsmanship, their identifica- 
tion of argument with style, and that wealth 
of undefiled and unconventionalized English 
which preserves for us a perfume as of old 
winCc 

Bacon adds to English even a richer grace. 
In the lofty fanaticism of his mission to 
regenerate and reconstruct all science — a 
task for which he had no adequate scientific 
preparation — he professed to disdain the pre- 



THE GREAT PROSE 131 

occupation with style which he saw hamper- 
ing the thought of so many of his predeces- 
sors in the European field of Renaissance 
physics and cosmosophy. But, fathered and 
mothered by a judge and a scholarly woman, 
and brought up in the full play of Elizabethan 
word-warfare of all kinds, he was a literary 
artist born and made. His literary power 
in fact outgoes his scientific competence ; 
and only that power and the intensity of his 
purpose save him on that side from oblivion. 
But where he applies his peculiar gift for 
criticism and analysis of men and polity, 
character and conduct and intellectual pro- 
clivity, he is one of the master writers of his 
race. The Essays, of which the first handful 
appeared in 1598, were inspired by those of 
Montaigne ; but Bacon takes absolutely his 
own way. The ruling tendencies of Mon- 
taigne are discursiveness and self -revelation : 
those of Bacon are concision and objectivity. 
Slight as his first volume is, never before in 
English had so much matter been packed 
into so little room, so many themes that had 
been buried in commonplace lifted to new 
life. Four-fifths of the essays, however, 
belong to the reign of James and the later 
years of Bacon's life ; and it must be ad- 
mitted that the ten essays of the first issue 
(printed by Bacon only under the pressure of 
imminent piracy), weigh little as against the 
large treasure of Montaigne. 



132 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

What may rightly be included in the last 
Elizabethan decade is the Advancement of 
Learning (1603), Bacon's most considerable 
treatise in English. After his fall he was to 
expand it into a bulky treatise in Latin, with 
seven Books added to the original two. This 
resort to Latin, on the double motive of his 
need to seek continental readers after his 
official disgrace, and his real but strangely 
wrong disbelief in the permanence of litera- 
ture in the modern tongues, is one of the 
chagrins of the lover of English. Bacon 
wrote Latin no better than a hundred other 
men ; whereas no man of his latter day could 
write English as he did. The all-round en- 
richment of the Essays in the later editions 
is warrant for saying that if he had been 
content to use his mother-tongue for all his 
work, he would have produced the finest 
body of native prose that ever stood to one 
man's credit. The extraordinary intellectual 
brilliance of the opening book of the Novum 
Organum, which shines through every transla- 
tion, would have been still more lustrous in 
the noble English in which he could have 
couched it. As it is, we can but note the irony 
of fate in the fact that he put into English 
the bulky Sylva Sylvarum or Natural History, 
a farrago of obsolete physics and obsolete 
physic, which, popular for some generations, 
has no lasting importance whatever. 

Already in the Advancement Bacon is a 



THE GREAT PROSE 133 

master of spacious no less than of sententious 
style. Hooker is eloquent under stress of 
religious emotion ; Bacon can be so in an 
intellectual exposition, his diction heightening 
and his cadence expanding to a rhythmic 
swell that arouses more of the sensations of 
poetry than does a great deal of Elizabethan 
verse. Even before the Advancement, it 
would seem, he had written the Valerius 
Terminus, one of a number of preludes and 
summaries in which he reached out towards 
his " Great Instauration." By him it was put 
aside, and only upon its accidental discovery 
was it published, a hundred years after his 
death. And yet here, in a mere unfinished 
draft, we have some of the stateliest prose in 
our literature : 

The dignity of this end (of endowment of man's life 
with new commodities) appeareth by the estimation 
that antiquity made of such as guided thereunto. 
For whereas founders of States, lawgivers, extirpers 
of tyrants, fathers of the people, were honoured but 
with the titles of Worthies or Demigods, inventors 
were ever consecrated amongst the Gods themselves. 
And if the ordinary ambitions of men lead them to 
seek the amplification of their power in their coun- 
tries, and a better ambition than that hath moved 
them to seek the amplification of the power of their 
own countries amongst other nations, better again 
and more worthy must that aspiring be which seeketh 
the amplification of the power and kingdom of man- 
kind over the world ; the rather because the other two 
prosecutions are ever culpable of much perturbation 
and injustice ; but this is a work truly divine, which 
Cometh in aura leni, without noise or observation. 



134 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

They err who ascribe to Bacon a " cold " 
nature. In the normal affections, whether 
of love or hate, he was not ardent, but his 
devotion to his great ideal was truly a passion. 
At the close of the first book of the Advance- 
ment it pulsates into as high a strain as any 
singer's : 

Lastly, leaving the vulgar arguments that by learn- 
ing man excelleth man in that wherein man excelleth 
beasts ; that by learning man ascendeth to the 
heavens and their motions, where in body he cannot 
come ; and the like ; let us conclude with the dignity 
and excellency of knowledge and learning in that 
wheremito man's natiu-e doth miost aspire ; which is 
immortality or continuance ; for to this tendeth 
generation, and raising of houses and families ; to 
this buildings, foundations, and monuments ; to this 
tendeth the desire of memory, fame, and celebration ; 
and in effect, the strength of all other human desires. 
We see then how far the monuments of wit and learn- 
ing are more durable than the monuments of power 
or of the hands. For have not the verses of Homer 
continued twenty-five hundred years or more, without 
the loss of a syllable or letter : during which time 
infinite palaces, temples, castles, cities, have been 
decayed and demolished ? It is not possible to have 
the true pictures or statues of Cyrus, Alexander, 
Caesar, no nor of the kings or great personages of 
much later years ; for the originals cannot last, and 
copies cannot but leese of the life and truth. But 
the images of men's wits and knowledges remain in 
books, exempted from the wrong of tirae and capable 
of perpetual renovation. Neither are they fitly to 
be called images, because they generate still and cast 
their seeds in the minds of others, provoking and 
causing infinite actions and opinions in succeeding 
ages. So that if the invention of the ship was thought 



THE GREAT PROSE 135 

so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from 
place to place, and consociateth the most remote 
regions in participation of their fruits, how much more 
are letters to be magnified, which as ships pass through 
the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to 
participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and in- 
ventions, the one of the other ? 

Neither under Elizabeth nor under James 
were there many Englishmen capable of rising 
to this appeal. Ben Jonson, with his quick 
response to all intellectual pressures, declared 
the greatness of the fallen Chancellor even as 
he did that of the dead Shakespeare ; but it 
was the fate of England, forlornly foreseen 
by Bacon, to drift for a generation through 
ecclesiastical strifes that culminated in a long 
civil war, rather than to attempt the way of 
scientific research to which he prematurely 
beckoned them. He was thus the prophet 
of times to come. 

And thus it comes about, too, that we are 
left looking back to the Elizabethan time as 
to one of a rich artistic florescence, not main- 
tained through the generation which followed. 
Elizabeth's reign had in fact been a time of 
signal receptiveness to foreign influence, for- 
tunately assimilated. Bacon's scientific in- 
terests had been aroused mainly by foreign 
treatises in Latin and by the general critical 
reaction against the worship of Aristotle. 
The new drama had been nourished by Italian 
and Spanish fiction ; the new poetry inspired 
by Italian and French models ; and the new 



136 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

prose owed much to the practice of transla- 
tion. In the year 1603, along with Bacon's 
Advancement, there appeared two of the 
greatest performances in that kind thus far 
seen : the rendering of Plutarch's M or alia by 
Philemon Holland, and that of Montaigne's 
Essays by John Florio ; alike in point of 
content and style the most readable folios of 
their day. Scores of translations of ancient 
classics and modern histories had already 
appeared ; but only a few with any authentic 
charm. Sir Thomas North's version of Plu- 
tarch's Lives, made from the French version 
of Amyot, is the best known of these, with 
its strong simplicity of old-world phrase. 
That of two Books of Herodotus by " B. R." 
(1584), and Underdowne's version of Helio- 
dorus, are in different degrees racy of the 
native speech : others, such as Fenton's trans- 
lation of Guicciardini's Italian history (1579), 
made through the French, sCre decidedly dry 
reading. It must have been a vigorous ap- 
petite for information that carried Fenton's 
folio of nigh twelve hundred pages into a 
second edition in a dozen years. Thomas 
Danett's rendering of the French history of 
Comines (1596) is much more appetizing, pro-, 
ceeding as it does upon a much more naive 
original, and couched as it is in the more art- 
less style of 1563, when Danett first framed it. 
There we may read " how the two Kings met 
and sware the treaty before concluded ; and 



THE GREAT PROSE 137 

how some supposed that the Holy Ghost came 
down upon the King of England's pavilion 
in the likeness of a white pigeon " ; and also 
more edifying matters. Comines had a real 
critical stimulus for Elizabethans, dating 
though he did two generations back. Danett's 
rendering of " The Conclusion of the Author " 
to his sixth book, which ends with the death 
of Louis XI, is quaintly charming : 

Now see here a great number of personages dead^ in 
short space, who travelled [= travailed] so mightily, 
and endured so many anguishes and sorrows to 
purchase honour and renoume, whereby they abridged 
their lives, yea and peradventure charged their souls. 
I speak not this of the Turk ; for I make account he 
is lodged with his predecessors [i.e. in bale] ; but our 
King and the rest, I trust, God hath taken to his 
mercy. Now, to speak of this point as a man un- 
learned, but having some experience : had it not 
been better both for these great Princes themselves 
and all their subjects that lived under them, and 
shall live under their successors, to have held a mean 
in all things, that is to say, to have attempted fewer 
enterprises, to have feared more to offend God, and 
persecute their subjects and neighbours so many 
sundry ways above rehearsed, and to have used honest 
pleasures and recreation ? Yes sure. For by that 
means their lives should have been prolonged, diseases 
should not so soon have assailed them, their death 
should have been more lamented and less desired ; 
yea, and they should have had less cause to fear 
death. . . . 

This is the main purport of the historical 

criticism of Raleigh, in his monumental work. 

But the translation of histories did not 



138 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

give opportunity for the fullest use or evolu- 
tion of the resources of the language ; and it 
is to Holland's Plutarch and Florio's Mon- 
taigne that we turn for the spectacle. Holland, 
a mighty scholar, who produced a whole 
barrow-load of huge translations — Pliny, Livy, 
Ammianus, Suetonius — besides his Plutarch^ 
must have looked askance at the company in 
which that foliocame out, both for its modernity 
and its matter ; but he and Florio are kindred 
craftsmen in their handling of the language. 
What they impress us with above all is its 
opulence. They are going to print in folio, 
and they are not fidgety about space. Each 
had a copious author to render, and each was 
zealous rather to expand than to compress. 
Florio had the advantage in respect of the 
unmatched spontaneity and vitality of his 
original, who comes into the literature of 
Europe with almost the force of another 
Renaissance, so potently does he extend that 
" discovery of man " which has been declared 
to be the purport of the period so named. 
But Montaigne was nourished on antiquity, 
and Plutarch's M or alia is the nearest classic 
equivalent to his mass of multiform commen- 
tary on men and things. To that undue 
reverence for antiquity which Bacon oppugned 
with special regard to the authority of Aris- 
totle, Montaigne was the supreme corrective ; 
and in Florio's hands he loses nothing of his 
wholesome provocativeness, albeit there are 



THE GREAT PROSE 139 

frequent mistakes as to the meaning in minor 
propositions. In a society much addicted 
to old and crusted commonplace, it was a 
liberalizing and expanding experience to meet 
with a man who was as ready to flout a custom, 
an authority, or a convention as to condemn 
thoughtless neologism, and whose self-dis- 
closure is a continuous series of awakening 
shocks to dull propriety. Bacon's polemic 
against the reign of Aristotle is but one of 
Montaigne's defiances to enthroned tradition : 
he has a thrust at every abuse and every 
prejudice. Here, too, was an opulence of 
sheer speech as great as that of Nashe, with 
a vastly wider and richer range of reflection. 
A hundred thoughts which have passed for 
original profundities are thrown out by Mon- 
taigne in passing : there is no human problem 
upon which he does not flash his light. It 
seems little necessary to prove in detail that 
he deeply stimulated both Bacon and Shake- 
speare : it would have been astonishing if he 
had not. 

If Montaigne was not otherwise one of the 
most important forces in English prose litera- 
ture from 1603 onwards, it was simply because 
his multitudinous fresh thought was above 
the heads of the majority, as indeed it must 
have been. The normal English mind can 
never have taken easily to a writer so uncon- 
cerned for propriety, so reckless of prejudice, 
so murderously frank. None the less was it 



140 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

a boon to our literature that he should have 
been Englished at the very height of the 
power of the Elizabethan speech, by one as 
free of that as Montaigne was of his powerful 
old French. For the " endenizened " Florio 
is one of the happiest treasurers of the Eliza- 
bethan vocabulary, dealing it out with a 
generous zest to which only Philemon Hol- 
land approximates. More correct translations 
there could easily be ; but so to seize the spirit 
and essence of the immortal original as to 
compete with that in all its literary qualities 
was a feat reserved for Florio, and indeed pos- 
sible only to a master of Elizabethan prose. 



CHAPTER VII 

POETRY AFTER SPENSER 

Spenser was fortunate in respect of the 
foils to his work presented by the contem- 
porary translators who most nearly paralleled 
it. Obviously Ariosto and Tasso were his 
main models ; and to compare him, in English 
verse, with his foreign masters was to realize 
that the disciple had an art and an inspiration 
all his own. It may or may not have been 
the example of Spenser that stirred Sir John 
Harington and Edward Fairfax to make their 
translations from Ariosto and Tasso {Orlando 
Furioso, 1591 ; Godfrey of Bulloigne ; or, 
Jerusalem Deliver ed, 1600) ; but Fairfax is 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 141 

clearly influenced by him. Their profuse 
assurances as to the moral and allegorical 
aims of their originals are warnings against 
a confiding view of the ethical purpose of 
Spenser ; but while they doubtless made their 
market in respect of those claims, they 
naturally do not attain to the kinds of com- 
pensation which he is able to offer for unreality 
of theme. Harington's sole attraction for a 
modern student is his exuberant naivete ; of 
poetic faculty he has the scantiest endowment. 
Of Fairfax, certainly a much more careful and 
competent workman, it was possible for some 
to speak with warm admiration as late as the 
first half of the nineteenth century ; but such 
a taste could not well survive the age of 
Tennyson ; and indeed it was probably from 
the first confined to a fastidious few. Possible 
as a romance for an age which could be fascin- 
ated by the florid prolixities of the Arcadia 
and the protracted fictions of Mademoiselle 
Scudery, Fairfax's version of the crusading 
epic of Tasso had small power to hold a world 
in which successive developments of realistic 
drama were at length to be eclipsed in living 
interest by the long evolution of the English 
novel. The melody and the literary art of 
the Italian originals inevitably evaporated in 
the hands of translators without special gifts. 
Fairfax is always metrically accurate, and is 
frequently musical in a simply verbal way ; 
but he is always far short of the Spenserian 



142 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

charm, and he has a way of compiHng lines 
which give a permanent monition as to how 
poetry is not to be written. Such series of 
vocables as : 

A blow so huge, so strong, so great, so sore , . . 
Sleep, ease, repose, rest, peace and quiet brings . . . 
But so doth heaven men's hearts turn, alter, change . . . 
Grief, sorrow, anguish, sadness, discontent . . . 
Jerusalem they view, they see, they spy . . . 
His hate, his ire, his rancour and his wrath . . • 
Their eager rage, their fury, spite, and ire . . . 

evidently struck him as impressive, and he 
chronically presents them. Spenser's padding 
is often bad enough, critically considered ; but 
he is never reduced to such mere collation 
of synonyms. From such patchwork as this, 
and from allegorical epic in general, the spirit 
of poetry turned away in the next reign to 
the more blessed tasks of the drama, of sub- 
jective verse — as in Donne, Carew, Herbert, 
and Crashaw — and of the lyric. Herrick, 
who occupies himself, strictly speaking, with 
none of these things, being in truth a poly- 
mathic artist in light verse, is the living re- 
minder that for all alike there is one thing 
needful, the concern for sincerity of feeling and 
beauty of form. 

< But round Spenser in his closing years there 
grew up a whole cluster of sonneteers and nar- 
rative poets, who are in their degree as char- 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 143 

acteristic of the age as he, or as the drama 
which is its supreme production. And again 
the stimulus can be seen to come from foreign 
Hteratures, now more widely studied than 
ever ; in particular the French. The sonnets 
of Surrey and Wyatt, inspired by Italian 
models, had not set any save a private 
fashion ; and it was not till 1584 that Thomas 
Watson's Hekatompathia, or Passionate Cen- 
turie of Love, began a native movement which 
was powerfully stimulated by French example, 
and which after six or seven years developed 
into a craze. 

The first sonnets published in this sequence 
were quite the worst. Watson avowedly 
copies French and other models, and he does 
it unmelodiously, infelicitously, and cheaply. 
But when he published his first set, many 
others had been penned and privately circu- 
lated for years past. Sidney in particular 
had already done many of his series to Stella ; 
and in 1591 these were posthumously pub- 
lished, with the effect of eliciting a perfect 
hubbub of imitation. The Jtstrophel and 
Stella title set the fashion of poetic names for 
such series. Samuel Daniel came out next 
year with his batch to Delia, and Henry 
Constable with his consignment to Diana. 
In 1593 appeared Barnabe Barnes's Parthe- 
nophil and Parthenophe, Lodge's Phillis, Giles 
Fletcher's Licia, and another posthumous 
bundle from Watson, as dead as their diligent 



144 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

author. Next year came revisions of Delia 
and Diana, accompanied by William Percy's 
Ccelia, somebody's Zepheria, and Drayton's 
Idea (first form) ; in 1595, Richard Barn- 
field's Cynthia, Spenser's Amoretti, and E. C.'s 
Emaricdulfe — an effort at originality in choice 
of title at least, but only by way of an ana- 
gram on the name of one Marie Cufeld. In 
1596 high-water mark as to quantity was 
reached with Griffin's Fidessa, Linch's Diella, 
and William Smith's Chloris. A Laura, by 
Robert Tofte, arrived in 1597. Shakespeare 
by this time had written a number of his 
sonnets, but was not minded to join the aviary 
in print, though an average sample of his 
has more charm and spontaneity than any 
save the best in the swarm. 

Never had there been such an outburst of 
lyricism in England ; and, despite the facility 
of much of the output, never, perhaps, was 
there in proportion so little of satisfying result 
to garner for posterity. The poets at first 
sight seem a very nest of singing birds, sing- 
ing because they must, on the ancient, the 
primal impulse. A perusal soon arouses a 
cold suspicion, fully confirmed by exact 
modern research, that the nest of singing 
birds is a cage of parrots. They translate 
the French and the Italians, and they imitate 
each other. Spenser and Sidney alone seem 
to have had a sincere motive : Sidney's pre- 
cept, finishing the first sonnet in the post- 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 145 

humous collection, was the one thing to 
which none of the imitators seems to have 
paid any attention. Daniel, Drayton, Con- 
stable, and Lodge copied their very titles ; 
and the three last-named include in their 
series direct but unavowed translations from 
the French ; as does even Spenser at times. 
Lodge is perhaps the most hardened — and not 
the least skilful — plagiarist of all : half his 
sonnets are translations. If ever the sonnet 
is personal, in the hands of any of the lesser 
practitioners, it is impossible to divine the 
fact with certainty from any superior vitality 
in the product. Sidney had warned the 
earlier sonneteers : 

You that do dictionary's method bring 
Into your rhymes running in rattHng rows ; 
You that poor Petrarch's long deceased woes 

With newborn sighs and denizened * wit do sing : 
You take wrong ways ! Those far-fet helps be such 
As do bewray a want of inward touch. 

And in the very delivery of the warning he 
himself is but turning a compliment to Stella 
— one of the many which leave men and 
women still debating whether he was in love 
with her. 

It all raises the question mooted by a poet 
of our own day, whether most poetry is not 
written because of lack of poetic feeling, by 
people seeking to set up the mood they crave 
for. Sidney, doubtless, had some live coals 
* Naturalized in a foreign country, 
10 



146 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

on his altar ; Daniel could be at times a poet 
in other forms than that of the sonnet ; Lodge 
had a genuine gift for lyric ; and Drayton 
did one of the few really great sonnets of the 
whole mass, besides moving Shakespeare to 
direct imitation in one other. Drayton's 

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, 

has the ring of actuality, even if it be an 
imitation ; and Sidney is often enough vibrant 
with a certain intensity of feeling to leave 
the problem in his case an open one. But 
some nine out of ten in the multitude raise 
no speculation at all beyond wonder at the 
assiduity with which men went on apostro- 
phizing the " cruel fair " as a stone or a 
tigress, a flint or a steel. " Those fatal an- 
thems and afflicted songs," as Daniel justly 
describes his own, almost move us to join in 
Sir John Davies's diatribe against the " bas- 
tard sonnets" which "base rhymers daily 
begot to their own shames and poetry's 
disgrace " ; though he was chiefly disgusted 
with the quasi-legal stanzas which in his own 
Sonnets he so wittily burlesqued. A plau- 
sible theory is that sonneteering was for a 
time a recognized mode of wooing ; that the 
variegated apostrophe to the mistress as a 
thing of marble was a species of compliment 
highly appreciated ; and that the display of 
rhyming power operated somewhat as the 
colouring of the male bird has been supposed 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 147 

to do in charming the female on humbler 
levels of life. But on any view the fact re- 
mains that this particular impulse from foreign 
literatures, coming among a people avowedly 
much given, with all their insularity (perhaps 
by reason of it), to the copying of foreign 
fashions, elicited for the most part but un- 
inspired mimicry, whereas the debt to foreign 
sources in the case of the drama was as no- 
thing compared with the native energy spent 
in turning mere tales of incident into creations 
of character beside which the prototypes are 
as shadows. 

The situation as regards the sonnet was in 
the end partially saved by Shakespeare, when 
his manuscripts were published without his 
leave. He too took to the sonnet under an 
impulse of imitation, often echoing his con- 
temporaries in phrase and in topic. But 
the abnormal perceptivity and responsiveness 
which underlie his dramatic work, and the 
unique facility of rhythmic utterance evi- 
denced by his two long poems, made the son- 
net for him an instrument as apt as to others 
it was recalcitrant. He never essayed the true 
Petrarchan form, which is the richest ; but 
he has given us a far larger number of really 
mellifluous sonnets than any other man con- 
trived to compass. It is far from certain 
that all, even of the most serious of his, are 
any more truly personal than those of the 
average sonnet-monger. One of the gravest. 



148 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Two loves I have of comfort and despair, 

is an obvious imitation of one of Drayton's ; 
unless, indeed, Drayton had read Shake- 
speare's in manuscript and copied that. See- 
ing that the 146th rather obviously echoes 
that of Sidney beginning : 

Leave me, O Love, which reaches but to dust, 

the presumption here is against Shakespeare ; 
and there are further reasons for doubting 
the personal character of many sonnets in 
the series. Though, like others of his day, 
he may have described himself as old when 
in his thirties (Nos. 63 and 73), it is hard to 
believe that in that (No. 62) in which are the 
lines : 

But when m.y glass shows me myself indeed, 
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity, 

he is not writing on behalf of a much older 
man, as Drayton avows he once did for a 
young one. In No. 138 we have merely : 

My days are past the best. 

If one sonnet be impersonal, many others 
may be. One closing couplet is duplicated 
(Nos. 36 and 96) ; and images are often re- 
peated (e.g. Nos. 2 and 60). When we learn 
that the stepfather of the Earl of Southampton 
was a " Mr. W. H.," we seem to see a way 
out of the puzzle set up by the famous dedica- 
tion of the printer. But whatever may be 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 149 

the difficulty of counting it all personal, it 
is no less difficult to doubt that in the sonnets 
which tell of 

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, 

and of having 

gone here and there 
And made myself a motley to the view, 

the poet is penning his own confession. We 
can but say that, whatever the inspiration, 
he is the most musical of all the sonneteers. 
Sometimes trivial, sometimes mawkish, he can 
hardly escape being tuneful. None else can 
ring the golden or the silver bells of song as 
he does in such lines as these : 

That thou among the wastes of time must go « m i 

And stretched metre of an antique song . , , 

With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare 
That heaven's air in this huge rondure hems . , , 

But that wild music burthens every bough , , , 

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul 

Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come. 

Can yet the lease of my true love control. 

Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom. 

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured 

And the sad augurs mock their own presage. « « .i 

And beauty making beautiful old rhyme. 

He is inevitably rhythmical, spontaneously 
lyrical ; and only Sidney and Drayton at their 
best can compare with him in force of feeling. 



150 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Sir John Davies, the foe of the sonneteers, 
switched poetry off upon very different Hnes 
from theirs ; showing, however, more of 
originaUty and intellectual power than of 
poetic inspiration. In 1596 appeared his 
Orchestra; or^ A Poem of Dauncing, sl thing 
" judicially " planned and penned, as the 
title-page claimed, and withal picked out with 
many a good line. Two in particular — 

For his [the Sea's] great crystal eye is always cast 
Up to the Moon, and on her fixed fast — 

caught the wandering glance of Coleridge, 
who turned them into 

His great bright eye most silently 
Up to the Moon is cast. 

Davies continued the figure musically enough : 

And as she daunceth in her pallid sphere 
So daunceth he about his Center here ; 

and he at times makes a single line really sing 
for us, as these : 

Or as a brook through pebbles wandering . . . 
Love in the twinkling of your eyelids daunceth. 

But Davies is a jurist, a reasoner, an Eliza- 
bethan " wit " ; and he thinks it a happy 
stroke to give us this : 

Behold the World, how it is whirled round 
And for it is so whirVd, is named so ! 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 151 

Had the Gulling Sonnets been printed in 
that day, instead of being left in manuscript 
for moderns to publish, the sonneteers must 
surely have taken their revenge on their 
assailant ; as, indeed, they ought to have 
done over his egregious series of twenty-six 
acrostic Hymns to Astrcea (1599), every one 
in three stanzas of five, five, and six lines, 
and all the lines beginning with the letters 
ELisA BETHA REGiNA. It is the last word in 
Elizabethan " foppery." And yet this strenu- 
ous trifler — who was indeed a man of great 
force of character, which he exhibited in re- 
sponsible posts after a violent youth-time — 
produced the most elaborately intellectual 
poem of that age, the Nosce Teipsum (" Know 
Thyself"), wherein that "Oracle" is "ex- 
pounded in two elegies, 1. Of human know- 
ledge; 2. Of the Soul of Man and the 
immortality thereof " (1599). The poem was 
written during a year of disgrace, fully earned 
by an act of ruffianly violence in the dining- 
hall of the Middle Temple ; but no man could 
infer from the verse that its author was lack- 
ing in self-control. A whole series of critics 
have avowed themselves divided between the 
two impressions set up by Davies's ratiocina- 
tive aim and procedure, so hard to endue 
with poetic charm, and the real skill and 
distinction of his versification. It is difficult 
by any standard — impossible by those of the 
sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth cen- 



152 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

turies — to deny the title of poetry to these 
stanzas : 

What is this knowledge but the sky-stoln fire 
For which the thief still chain'd in ice doth sit ? 

And which the poor rude Satyr would admire. 
And needs would kiss, but burnt his lips with it. 

• • • • • 

We that acquaint ourselves with every zone. 
And pass both tropics, and behold the poles. 

When we come home, are to ourselves unknown. 
And unacquainted still with our own souls. 

• • • • • 

I know my soul hath power to know all things. 
Yet is she bHnd and ignorant in all ; 

I know I am one of Nature's little kings, 
Yet to the last and vilest things am thrall. 

It is only the sustained and persistent disputa- 
tion that forces us out of the poetic mood 
set up again and again in both parts of the 
book by grave music of this kind. Didacti- 
cism is well-nigh everywhere in Elizabethan 
poetry ; but Davies carries didacticism to 
the plane of dialectic, where poetry, in 
essence " simple, passionate, sensuous," can- 
not ply her wings. And yet this curiously 
argumentative and propagandist poem, with 
its pertinacious special pleading, may be 
found more readable by some lovers of poetry 
in our day than many coeval performances 
that profess loyalty to the artistic first prin- 
ciples which it defies, inasmuch as they so 
often fall from grace in the pursuit of poetic 
purpose, while this so often rises to charm 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 153 

in the course of a planned dissertation. There 
is reason to think, anyway, that Shakespeare 
read it with some attention (he uses its 
phrase " spirit of sense ") ; and we may do 
as much. 

More assured, however, of the attention of 
poetry-craving readers are the muses of the 
two more famous poets who flourished in 
and out-lived the Elizabethan age, Drayton 
and Daniel, although both wrote long quasi- 
historical poems which from the point of view 
of posterity make the cardinal mistake of 
setting poetry to do non-poetical work. It 
was not quite unjustly said of Daniel by 
Drayton in old age that his poetic manner 
" better fitted prose " ; but the puzzle is to 
know wherein Drayton thought his own 
average manner was any better. Thomas 
Lodge, himself an accomplished writer in 
many forms, spoke of " Daniel, choice in 
word and invention ; Drayton, diligent and 
formal." In any case, Daniel's poetic manner 
was his best. The prose of his Collection of 
the History of England is in the main flat ; 
while the diction of his rhymed Civil Wars 
is often stately enough to make the phrase 
" well-languaged Daniel," applied to him by 
William Browne, thoroughly applicable. His 
line on the Thames — 

Glides on with pomp of waters unwithstood — 

recommended itself to Wordsworth and Coler- 



154 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

idge, of whom the latter pronounced his verse 
" a model of the middle style " ; and he has 
many such well-sounding lines. But he is at 
his best in gravely impassioned argument, of 
which his finest example is the Musophilus, 
or^ A General Defence of Learning (1599), a 
not very promising title of a philosophic 
poem. It is in this vein that he comes nearest 
to the passion which engenders poetry : 

For Emulation, that proud nurse of Wit, 

Scorning to stay below or come behind. 
Labours upon that narrow top to sit 

Of sole perfection in the highest kind. 

11,259-62. 

This is the thing that I was bom to do : 
This is my Scene, this part I must fulfil. 

II, 577-8. 

Men find that action is another thing 

Than what they in discoursing papers read : 

The world's affairs require in managing 

More Arts than those wherein you clerks proceed : 

Wliilst timorous knowledge stands considering. 
Audacious Ignorance hath done the deed ; 

For who knows most, the more he knows to doubt : 

The least discourse is commonly most stout. 

II, 486-93. 

At times the poetic plane is really reached : I 

Who can tell for what great work in hand 
The greatness of our style is now ordained ? 

What powers it shall bring in, what spirits com- 
mand . . . 

It is well approv'd 
The speech of heaven with whom they have com- 
merce 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 155 

That only seem out of themselves remov'd 

And do with more than human skills converse : 

Those numbers wherewith heav'n and earth are mov'd 
Show, weakness speaks in Prose, but Power in Verse. 

II, 963-80. 

In some of his didactic epistles, as in that 
To the Countess of Bedford, he again reaches 
high levels : 

Since all the good we have rests in the mind. 
By whose proportions only we redeem 

Our thoughts from out confusion, and do find 
The measure of ourselves and of our powers, 

And that all happiness remains confined 
Within the kingdom of this breast of ours. 

II, 50-5. 

Best of all perhaps is the often-quoted 
couplet (a saying of Seneca^s) : 

And that unless above himself he can 
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man. 

To the Countess of Cumherlandy II, 98-99. 

Not unnaturally did Wordsworth find a 
kindred spirit in the writer of these lines, who 
anticipates him in many matters, though not 
in his worship of Nature, which was not an 
Elizabethan cult. Jonson ought to have 
admired Daniel, but did not. 

Drayton, in his partly different way, is no 
more if no less memorable. He had more of 
sheer poetic fire : none of Daniel's sonnets 
will compare with his best ; and his Ballad of 
Agincourt is quite out of his brother poet's 



156 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

reach ; but he, too, produced a mass of his- 
toriographic verse in which inspiration is as 
it were only strenuously climbed to, Pegasus 
not being available. In his early Harmony of 
the Church (1591), the height is not at all 
attained ; and it remains something of a 
mystery that that tame performance should 
have been ecclesiastically prosecuted. But 
in his Ode to Elizabeth (1593) there is a real 
lyric flight, and a flash of transfiguring charm : 

Make her a goodly chapilet of azur'd columbine. 
And wreathe about her coronet with sweetest eglan- 
tine ; 
Bedeck our Beta all with 1 es. 
And the dainty daffadillies. 
With roses damask, white and red, and fairest flower- 

de-lys. 
With cowslips of Jerusalemy and cloves of Paradise. 

He was a warm admirer of both Spenser 
and Sidney : indeed, he is cordial in his praise 
of many contemporaries, including Shake- 
speare. Spenser, in turn, probably meant for 
him the praise given to " Action " in Colin 
Cloufs Come Home Again. But he is singu- 
larly unequal in his execution. It has been 
said of him, with guarded enthusiasm, that 
in his work " poetry is never far off " ; and 
this may be hesitatingly allowed, with the 
suggestion that The Barons^ Wars and Poly- | 
olbion had better not be grappled with by the 
ingenuous reader till he has otherwise realized 
that Drayton is really a poet. His con- 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 157 

temporaries called him " golden-mouthed " 
as they called Daniel well-languaged ; and 
they pair well, though Drayton's richer epithet 
is scarcely judicial. The truth is that his 
occasional prose has rather more distinction 
than the bulk of his abundant yet laboured 
verse. When in 1603 he transposed his 
Mortimeriados into The Barons^ Wars, alter- 
ing the stanza of seven lines into one of eight, 
he affixed an explanatory preface that has 
fascinated every modern reader with its 
justification of the technical change ; 

This [stanza] of eight both holds the tune clean 
thorow to the Base of the Column (which is the 
couplet, the foot or bottom) and closeth not but with 
a full satisfaction to the ear for so long detention. 

Briefly, this sort of stanza hath in it Majesty, Per- 
fection, and Solidity, resembling the pillar which in 
Architecture is called the Tuscan, whose Shaft is of 
six Diameters, and Bases of two. The other reasons 
this place will not bear ; but generally, all Stanzas 
are in my opinion but Tyrants and Torturers, when 
they make invention obey their number, which 
sometime would otherwise but scantle itself. A 
fault that great Masters in this Art strive to avoid. 

The reader of The Barons^ Wars is tempted to 
give a respectful assent to the indictment of 
all stanzas, without acquiescing in the prior 
claim for that of eight lines. Drayton often 
rises high above the aesthetic levels of the 
Mirrour for Magistrates ; but also terribly 
often adheres to them. 

In his own day he seems to have been famed 



158 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

for the Idea sonnets, which aim in general 
more successfully at force than at beauty, 
and his England's Heroical Epistles (1597), 
which were many times reprinted. It would 
seem that their form — the heroic couplet — 
had much to do with their acceptance. It 
undeniably gives them a certain declamatory 
and epigrammatic vigour, which makes the 
Epistle of Rosamond to Henry sound more 
incisively than Daniel's Complaint of Rosa- 
mond ; and the taste for this was to become 
the ruling standard in England for many 
generations. But while we may fairly liken 
Drayton to Dryden for power in this kind, 
we are not thereby withheld from confessing 
that, though there will always be readers who 
prefer rhetoric to poetry, his most popular 
work stands rather for a surrender than a 
capture of the great guerdon sought for in 
the best hours of Elizabethan song. 

The most inspired poem of his Elizabethan 
time is the Endimion and Phoebe (1595), 
which he not only did not reprint but aban- 
doned, turning much of it later (1606) into 
the unreadable satirical piece called The Man 
in the Moon, as if he repented of the original. 
Inspired probably less by Venus and Adonis 
than by Marlowe's posthumous Hero and 
Leander, which had been circulated in manu- 
script before being printed, the Endimion 
belongs to the springtime of his genius ; and 
has more of vital power, though much less of 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 159 

sustained fluency, than Shakespeare's facile 
and popular poem. It is an open question 
whether it was jettisoned because of misgiving 
about its theme or of disinclination to re- 
main in competition with a piece which had 
eclipsed it in vogue. Perhaps both surmises 
may stand. Drayton's sense of perfection 
was uneasy rather than sure : he left weak 
lines in his famous Ballad even after long re- 
vision ; and the Battle of Agincourt into which 
he inflated it is heavily laboured and ill- 
inspired. But he always had in him, in his 
own words of generous praise of the compeers 
of his youth, " brave translunary things " ; 
and the fashion in which, from his Elizabethan 
roots, he put forth in later life all manner of 
poetry in the fashion of another age, is one of 
the most singular things in literary history. 

Marlowe revealed his elemental power less 
in narrative than in dramatic verse ; but 
there too his force transcends that of nearly 
all his rivals. Shakespeare of course excelled 
him in fluidity, but fell below him in vigour, 
being for once bent only on book-making, 
whereas Marlowe wrought [always with a 
certain eager ardour, which gives vividness to 
the first sestiad of his unfinished Hero and 
Leander, and to the second something more ; 
though it must be admitted that Chapman, 
who continued the poem through four added 
sestiads, shows on the whole a more abundant 
vein. In this erotic poem Marlowe is notably 



160 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

sententious ; and Shakespeare mused on his 
" saw of might " which comes at the close of a 
passage not usually quoted in full. 

It lies not in our power to lovo or hate. 

For will in us is overruled by fate. 

When two are stript, long ere the course begin. 

We wish that one would lose, the other win ; 

And one especially do we affect 

Of two gold ingots, like in each respect ; 

The reason no man knows : let it suffice 

What we behold is censured [ = judged] by our eyes. 

Where both deliberate, the love is slight : 

Who ever loved that loved not at first sight ? 

As if to show that he was no mere amorist, 
he followed up his version (in every sense loose) 
of Ovid's Elegies with one of the first book 
of Lucan, of which the concision and force, 
maintained line for line throughout, are not 
to be matched among English translations. 

That tour de force might have been expected 
to have set up a fashion of narrative or epic 
blank verse ; but the lead was not taken, 
save perhaps by Shakespeare and Jonson in 
the liberation of their rhythms. Like Chap- 
man and Drayton, Jonson was fatally at- 
tracted to the heroic couplet for his non- 
dramatic purposes ; and it is in that pedestrian 
measure that he pens most of the Epistles and 
Elegies which give weight to his Forest and 
his Underwoods. What he could do with it 
at and near his best is to be seen in his noble 
lines To the Memory of my beloved Master 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 161 

William Shakespeare ; his glowing Vision on 
the Muses of his friend Michael Drayton ; 
and his less exalted epistles To the Earl of 
Dorset, To a Friend, to persuade him to the 
Wars, and To Master John Selden, All this 
is post-Elizabethan ; but here, varying be- 
tween the moral vein, as in the lines : 

'Tis by degrees that men arrive at glad 
Profit in aught : each day some little add. 
In time 'twill be a heap : this is not true 
Alone in money, but in manners too, 

and the higher flight of his enthusiascic 
panegyrics, he sets the Elizabethan stamp 
upon a mode of verse which was to be the 
normal form of poetry in England for two 
hundred years. 

Truly Elizabethan, too, was Chapman in 
some respects ; yet he might almost be called 
the spiritual father of the " metaphysical " 
school of the next age. He enters the scene 
in 1594, with his Shadow of Night, made up of 
a Hymnus in Noctem and a Hymnus in Cyn- 
thiam. Anything further removed from the 
still unfinished Faerie Queene it would be hard 
to plan. In technique Chapman is at once 
novel, obscure, and wantonly archaic. He 
flaunts the old offence of gratuitously altering 
accent to make a rhyme : 

Who running far, at length each pours her heart 
Into the bosom of the guKy desart. 

And eagle-like dost with thy starry wings 

Beat in the fowls and beasts to Somnus' lodgings. 

11 



162 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

The archaistic school — Spenser and Peele in 
particular — had done this kind of thing ap- 
parently as part of their archaism ; and the 
song-makers copied the old usage naturally : 
Chapman combines it with the most reckless 
neology, in a superfoetation of thought and 
imagery that often defies construing. The 
effect of this, as of much of his later verse, in- 
cluding the dramatic, can best be likened to 
that of a volcano erupting in darkness, with 
an immensity of occult energy and an occa- 
sional lurid flash of light, but with small 
ministry of joy or beauty. If Shakespeare as 
a dramatist was " for all time," Chapman 
as an original poet was for none. His un- 
paralleled obscurity is that of convulsive 
thought which never clears itself save in 
isolated passages : for stately Elizabethan 
commonplace he commonly substitutes a 
cryptic discourse which suggests profundity 
chiefly by being unintelligible. When a clear 
couplet comes, it is fine in the Elizabethan 
way : 

No pen can anything eternal write 

That is not steeped in humour of the night. 

But he will without scruple trip up a fluent 
sequence for an archaistic rhyme : 

Time's motion being like the reeling sun's. 
Or as the sea reciprocally runs. 
Hath brought us now to their opinions 
As in our garment ancient fashions 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 163 

Are newly worn ; and as sweet poesy- 
Will not be clad in her supremacy 
With those strange garments (Rome's hexameters) 
As she is English ; but in right prefers 
Our native robes (put on with skilful hands, 
English heroics) to those antic gavlands. 

The classic measure, dating from Chaucer, is 
wilfully flawed with an archaic disfigurement 
far more disturbing than any pedantic clas- 
sicism. Yet when we turn to his stanza- 
work in Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595), we 
feel he might do anything in technique if he 
would. It was a period of erotic poems, com- 
peting with sonnets ; and Chapman can be as 
erotic as any ; but he has no need of such 
material to be poetic : 

O Beauty, how attractive is thy power ! 

For as the life's heat clings about the heart. 
So all men's hungry eyes do haunt thy bower. 

Reigning in Greece, Troy swam to thee in art ; 
Removed to Troy, Greece followed thee in fears. 

Thou drew'st each sireless sword, each childless dart 
And pull'dst the towers of Troy about thine ears ; 

Shall I then muse that thus thou drawest me ? 

No, but admire, I stand thus far from thee. 

But he was to devote himself in the main 
to the " English heroics " of his early praise, 
and to win his fullest meed of fame by raising 
to a new power and splendour the old verna- 
cular verse of fourteen syllables. His coup- 
lets, far as they are from the calm lucidity of 
the Augustan age, sound the very note of 



164 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

its decadent style in the phrase " enamelled 
meads " : his English " fourteeners " were 
uncopied and inimitable. 

A translation of Homer had been attempted 
by several hands before 1580 : one by Byn- 
neman, giving ten Books, being entered for 
publication in that year ; and one of ten 
Books, made from the French, by Arthur Hall, 
being published in the following year. Drant, 
the translator of two books of Horace's 
Satires (1566), had translated four Books of 
Homer, but did not publish his work. Hall's 
version, which no modern critic or historian 
appears to have seen, passed out of sight as 
a complete failure. Chapman thus had a 
free field ; and he took possession so power- 
fully that not till Pope did any one try to 
compete. The otherwise insoluble problem 
of translating the Iliad he solved by turning 
it into a " Hom eristic " poem in the old native 
measure, never before so ennobled, attaining 
with it a kind of effect quite new in English 
poetry, but so telling in its kind, in virtue of 
his own poetic power and variety of rhythm, 
that his is to this day the most readable of all 
the English translations. He does not come 
off very well in the loveliest passages, as that 
at the end of the eighth Book, where he loses 
the supreme simplicity of Homer in rhyme- 
seeking ; but he keeps up in general a sounding 
and sweeping and changing rhythm that in 
its own kind is admirable. As here : 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 165 

Thus charged he her with haste, that did before with 

haste abound. 
Who cast herself from all the heights with which steep 

heaven is crown'd. 
And as Jove, brandishing a star, which men a comet 

call. 
Hurls out his curled hair abroad, that from his brand 

exhale 
A thousand sparks to fleets at sea and every mighty 

host. 
Of all presages and ill-haps a sign mistrusted most ; 
So Pallas fell twixt both the camps, and suddenly was 

lost ; 
When through the breasts of all that saw, she strook a 

strong amaze 
With viewing in her whole descent her bright and 

ominous blaze. 

He alters his original as often as he sees fit. 
" Which is all paraphrastical in my transla- 
tion," he curtly remarks at the end of one 
footnote. In the " Commentarius " at the 
ends of some of the Books the Elizabethan 
poet lets himself loose. Jonson himself is 
not so pugnacious ; though a common wrath 
at the impertinence of popular and other 
criticism was for him and Chapman a bond 
of amity. Chapman is always striving and 
crying aloud. In his explosive prefaces he 
seems to quiver with fury at an antagonism 
which has not yet had the chance to express 
itself, but which he fiercely anticipates. 
" We have example sacred enough," he shouts, 
" that true Poesy's humility, poverty and 
contempt, are badges of divinity, not vanity. 



166 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced 
worldlings ... I for my part shall ever 
esteem it much more manly and sacred, in 
this harmless and pious study, to sit till I 
sink into my grave, than shine in your vain- 
glorious bubbles and impieties ; all your poor 
policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no 
more valuing than a musty nut." He did 
protest too much. It has been suggested that 
it was he to whom Shakespeare alluded in 
the 86th Sonnet as being, with " the full proud 
sail of his great verse, bound for the prize " 
of his patron. On that view the greater poet 
was the humbler — if indeed he was serious. 

In Chapman's version of the Odyssey, which 
appeared in the year of Shakespeare's death, 
the " full proud sail " is furled. The heroic 
couplet has taken the place of the fourteener, 
and the result is substantial failure. 

Another dramatist of the earlier flight, 
Thomas Lodge, shows in the poetry freely 
scattered through his prose romances Rosa- 
lynde and A Margarite of America a fertility 
of metrical form and ease of scansion that 
might have resulted in some memorable poetry 
if only Lodge had had something vital to 
sing. Some of his lines are good enough for 
anybody, for instance : 

See where the babes of memory are laid 
Under the shadow of Apollo's tree. 

In Commendation of a Solitary Life. 

But though he produced in The Complaint 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 167 

of Elstred (1593) a composition in the taste of 
the Mirrour for Magistrates and of Daniel and 
Drayton ; and in Glaucus and Silla (1589) an 
elaborate erotic poem, which seems to have 
suggested Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis — 
besides satires, sonnets, odes, and epistles — 
he does not attain to the category of the 
masters in any one form ; and has indeed 
never been made accessible to the ordinary 
reader even to the extent to which Daniel and 
Drayton have. It is but fair to say of him 
that while in his longer and shorter pieces 
alike he often lays under contribution the 
French and Italian verse of his day, he not 
seldom improves upon it to the extent of 
yielding us a very spontaneous-seeming and 
tuneful English poem in place of a rather stiff 
French one ; and if his verss were but col- 
lected in the ordinary way he might still find 
a considerable audience. As it is, he seems 
likely to be best remembered by the single 
madrigal : 

Love in my bosom like a bee 
Doth suck his sweet. 

And indeed it is by such felicities as that 
that Elizabethan literature still chiefly appeals 
to many readers. The song-books of the time, 
and the songs scattered through the plays, 
are felt to keep with them an old-world fra- 
grance which no other age has recaptured. 
As with the sonnets, it is a case of over-pro- 



168 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

duction, with but a percentage of perfection ; 
yet the gems suffice to give lustre to the whole. 
Taking Elizabethan together with Stuart 
drama, we are bound to say that the lyric 
note is best maintained by the playwrights, 
whose dramatic discipline quickened their 
pulses, and by the story-tellers, who seem to 
have felt the need of heightening by song 
the effects of their over- voluble prose. Apart 
from a few fine things by Wyatt and Surrey, 
the art of delicate lyric begins in England in 
that age ; and Lilly among the dramatists 
should have the credit of showing the way, 
though he was soon surpassed. Shakespeare's 
" Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate sings" 
is distilled from a line of his. Greene, who 
put no serious songs in his plays, lit up his 
tales with many, some of them wholly charm- 
ing, as the favourite lullaby, 

Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee. 

Nashe, who was too essentially a master of 
prose to be quite a poet, has one line in a song 
in Summer^ s Last Will : 

Go not yet hence, bright soul of the sad year, 

which strangely well fulfils the sense of " the 
lyrical cry." Even Peele can warble ; and 
the detached " sonnet," 

His golden locks time hath to silver turned, 
keeps for him a safe place in the Elizabethan 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 169 

bead-roll. And though Shakespeare here, as 
in sonnet and drama, has done the finest things, 
and is to be crowned for the perfect loveliness 
of 

Take, oh take those lips away, 

while Fletcher is probably to be credited with 
the incongruous second stanza (in which the 
woman's voice turns to a man's) : 

Hide, oh hide those hills of snow, 

it must be granted that Fletcher's fertility and 
felicity in lyric place him quite in the front 
rank. The Faithful Shepherdess is as rich in 
song as it is poor in drama ; and he has so 
many good things elsewhere that it remains 
possible to doubt whether he or Shakespeare 
wrote 

Roses, their sharp spines being gone 

in The Two Noble Kinsmen ; though the line 
" With harebells dim " seems to have the very 
signature of him among whose best-loved 
flowers were " violets dim." 

Beaumont has one signal success : 

Shake off your heavy trance 

And leap into a dance 

Such as no mortal used to tread : 

Fit only for Apollo 
To play to, and the moon to lead, 

Ajid all the stars to follow I 



170 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

And Dekker and Hey wood have their pro- 
minent place in the choir, the former with his 

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers, 

in Patient Grissel, and the songs in the Shoe- 
makefs Holiday and Old Fortunatus ; the 
latter with his 

Ye little birds that sit and sing 

in The Fair Maid of the Exchange, and the 
delightful 

Pack, clouds, away, and welcome day ! 

in his Baye of Lucrece. Anthony Munday, who 
in drama has left but a reputation for unam- 
bitious handicraft, would seem tohave achieved 
the limpid rustic song on the dead Robin Hood 
in his and Chettle's play of 1601. Rare Ben 
Jonson, it is true, hardly ever strikes the desir- 
able note in his plays ; but he has left us that 
enduring song, " Drink to me only with thine 
eyes," so wonderfully compounded from dead 
bones of pedantry. 

Of the professed song-writers, the most 
memorable is Thomas Campion, Doctor of 
Physic, if we credit him with the whole of the 
verse in the first Book of Airs (1601) by him 
and his friend Philip Rosseter. Ostensibly, 
each contributed twenty-one lyrics, and Ros- 
seter the whole of the airs; but the critics 
are more or less confident in ascribing to 
Campion all of the verse, and half of the music. 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 171 

It is noteworthy that some of the best poems, 
such as, 

And would you see my mistress' face ? 

are in the second section, ascribed to Ros- 
seter ; but there is a similarity in the work 
which goes to support the view that he meant 
to claim merely the tunes. A certain in- 
security of rhythm pervades both sections, 
as if the creation of the poems with the music 
made the author partly inattentive to the 
laws of verbal metre. Indeed, this composer 
of songs with words professed only to write, 
'* after the fashion of the times, ear-pleasing 
rhymes, without art," and only once, in a set 
of Sapphics, to copy the ancients who " tied 
themselves strictly to the number and value 
of their syllables " ; and yet the sapphics, as 
a matter of fact, are far from being strict. In 
the following year Campion published Ob- 
servations in the Art of English Poesie, " where- 
in it is demonstratively proved, and by 
example confirmed, that the English tongue 
will receive eight several kinds of numbers, 
proper to itself, which are all in this book set 
forth, and were never before this time by any 
man attempted.''^ The book is dedicated to 
the Lord High Treasurer, Lord Buckhurst, 
to whom the author explains that 

Poesy in all kind of speaking is the chief beginner 
and maintainor of eloquence, not only helping the 
ear with the acquaintance of sweet numbers, but also 



172 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

raising the mind in a more high and lofty conceit. 
For this end have I studied to induce a true form of 
versifying into our language : for the vulgar and 
unartificial [ = imskiKul] custom of riming hath, I 
know, deterred many excellent wits from the exercise 
of English poesy. 

It is a comfort to find that poetry is for 
once not to be extolled as a moral function ; 
but no theorist ever more completely failed 
to make good his professed purpose than did 
Campion. His eight forms of verse " proper 
to " English are but mechanical performances 
in classical metres, with the marked exception 
of the first example, which, describ d as 
" licentiate iambics," is simply the now estab- 
lished English blank verse, written with a due 
admixture of iambs and trochees, with an 
occasional dactyl. Other examples are in 
what Campion calls " our iambic dimetre, or 
English march," which runs : 

Raving war, begot 
In the thirsty sands 
Of the Libyan Isles ; 

and the rest are in more or less " strict " 
trochaics, elegiacs, sanphics, and " a kind of 
Anacreontic verse." The mystery is, how the 
poet came to suppose that he was the first to 
produce his so-called " licentiate iambics." 
Apparently he had seen no blank-verse plays, 
and knew not of Surrey's version of Virgil. 
In point of fact he writes a fair but stiff " end- 
stopped " blank verse, which at that very 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 173 

time was being triumphantly superseded in 
the theatres. 

The book, naturally, had not the slightest 
effect on anybody's practice, the author him- 
self tranquilly disregarding afterwards his 
own precepts. It is indeed far from certain 
that he had ever felt any serious concern for 
them. He was a cultured eccentric, a lean 
physician, who professed to envy the fat ; 
and a man capable of that make-believe would 
not stick at trifles in theory-mongering. 
Clever, neatly written, and essentially wrong- 
headed, the essay was duly and politely con- 
futed by Samuel Daniel in an Apologie for 
Byrne in the same year ;, and Campion, living 
on till 1620, produced several more " Books of 
Airs " in which he presents a multitude of 
lyrics all in rhyme, which he handles with an 
increasing competence ; also several masques ; 
and never an unrhymed poem of any de- 
scription. He died, it would seem, of the 
plague, and left " all he had unto Mr. Philip 
Rosseter, and wished that his estate had been 
far more." It amounted to £22. 

Campion has not left us one really great 
song ; and he made many that lack distinc- 
tion. But he maintains a level of independent 
poetic feeling and graceful execution that en- 
titles him to be remembered as an estimable 
and accomplished Elizabethan, one of the 
many literary and scholarly physicians of that 
time. With his skill and originality in music 



174 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

and his scholarly interest in poetic experiment, 
he is indeed one of the ornaments of an age 
in which the love and practice of the arts of 
song were too general to be called dilettantism; 
and which thus still gives out for us, as it were, 
a far-away sound of viols and flutes. 

And that is a pleasanter thing to be re- 
membered by than the efforts at satire which 
mark the last decade of the sixteenth century. 
There is some dispute as to whether Joseph 
Hall or John Marston be — as each claimed 
for himself — the first satirist proper in the 
field of English poetry. In point of fact both 
Wyatt and Surrey had attempted that literary 
exercise, to say nothing of Skelton and Roye, 
the assailants of Cardinal Wolsey ; Gas- 
coigne's Steel Glass, which must be assigned 
to that order, is also prior ; and even Lodge's 
Fig for Momus anticipates the rival claimants. 
For that matter, Spenser's Mother Huhherd's 
Tale dates from 1591, whereas Hall's satires 
were published in 1597, and Marston's Scourge 
of Villainy in 1598. As between Hall and 
Marston the " point of precedency," as Doctor 
Johnson would say, is of no great importance. 
Hall, who became a bishop, has three of his 
devotional sayings standing to his credit in 
the Dictionary of Familiar Quotations, but 
none from his satires ; and Marston has none 
at all. The substantial differences between 
them are that Hall is decent, and Marston 
otherwise ; and that the latter by dint of 



POETRY AFTER SPENSER 175 

raucous violence makes the more powerful 
and unpleasant impression. But neither can 
maintain the epigrammatic force and finish 
which alone can make satirical verse memor- 
able ; and Marston's violence, which always 
sets up the suggestion of a vulgar moralist 
pelting his victims with high-smelling mis- 
siles, arouses dislike rather than amuse- 
ment. Satire as distinguished from abuse 
was not really an Elizabethan accomplish- 
ment ; it was to be cultivated in an age with 
fewer illusions, less genius, and less poetry. 



CHAPTER VIII 

SHAKESPEARE 

Shakespeare enters the dramatic lists, 
obscurely enough, some short time before the 
death of Greene. We cannot say exactly in 
what year he came to London from his native 
Stratford-on-Avon ; but the presumption is 
that it was about 1588, and that he had already 
become an actor in the company originally 
attached to the Earl of Leicester, which on 
that nobleman's death was taken over by 
Lord Strange, and later, after reconstruction, 
became known as the Lord Chamberlain's 
men. A simple actor the youth must have 
been for several years, and there is no evi- 
dence that he was ever reckoned a great one — 
a matter in which he is on a par with Ben 



176 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Jonson and other playwrights of the time who 
occasionally acted. There is, in fact, no case 
on record of a great actor who was also a great 
writer ; and men have accordingly been apt 
to undervalue Shakespeare's training on the 
boards as a factor in his dramatic preparation. 
It was probably, however, of capital im- 
portance in his artistic evolution. AH forms 
of art and science can ultimately be seen to 
be perfected by way of an intensifying of 
thought and feeling, in which the data are re- 
felt and re-considered. The deepening may 
come through simple iteration of the pro- 
cesses by a faculty that ripens with time — 
the evolution of the individual ; or by the 
advent of new faculty, which sees and sensates 
freshly — the evolution of the race. But 
genius is always conditioned, and Shakespeare 
in Sidney's place would not have been the 
Shakespeare we possess. Marlowe could not 
as an experienced actor have produced the 
drama with which he began ; he would have 
seen such matter to be poetic recitation rather 
than the expression of character in action. 
Shakespeare, with his unique powers in course 
of growth, had to undergo the provocation of 
having to declaim and hearing declaimed the 
verse of poets who were outside rather than 
inside their subject : whatever his mimetic 
gift, he must have wanted to improve on that : 
the less the mimetic faculty, perhaps, the 
more would it crave naturalness of phrase 



SHAKESPEARE 177 

and of character-type, even in the poetic form. 
Moliere's is a parallel case. The course of 
artistic advance in the case of Kyd, Greene, 
and Marlowe, had been by transition from 
remote to near types of personage — from 
Tamburlaine and Orlando, the unknown life 
of the past or of a wholly imaginary Spain, 
to modern and near forms — Arden, Alice, 
Faustus, Dorothea, English kings and Eng- 
lish nobles. Thus alone could imagination 
for them be vitalized. Shakespeare, with his 
higher faculty, made yet another step towards 
reality. For him realization was at once 
objective and subjective : the more real 
character-types had to pass the crucible of 
the actor — himself in this case the greatest 
poet of all. 

His preparation was all the better for being 
non-academic : he had no august conventions 
to outgrow. He appears to have had an 
ordinary Elizabethan grammar-school educa- 
tion, and thereafter to have helped in the 
somewhat miscellaneous business of his father, 
John Shakespeare, who acted as tanner, 
glover, and butcher for the village. It is not 
yet certain whether the father's later record 
of fines and disabilities stood for mismanage- 
ment in business, or for recusancy to the 
ecclesiastical administration, which was 
aggressively hostile to nonconformity. All 
that seems clear is that John Shakespeare 
passed from a period of local success, during 

12 



178 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

which he was for a time bailiff of the town, to 
one of relative depression and anxiety ; and 
that the young William, making an early and 
hasty marriage, found it difficult to maintain 
his wife and three children, and accordingly 
went on the stage. It is obviously likely 
that, with his faculties, he had taken an 
especial interest in the travelling companies 
who visited Stratford ; and that such a re- 
cruit would be welcomed by the players, 
whether on tour or in London, when they 
had a vacancy. And it seems just as likely 
that if his father's and his own affairs had 
gone smoothly at Stratford he might never 
have figured as a poet or dramatist at all. 

It is in 1592, in Greene's deathbed pamphlet 
of repentance, reproach, and vituperation, 
that we have the first trace of Shakespeare 
as a " Shake-scene," a Johannes Fac-totum 
of his company, who could " bombast out a 
blank- verse " for them with a facility which 
made him an unwelcome rival to the regular 
playwrights. That is to say, he was already 
adapting and recasting other men's work, 
and probably collaborating either with out- 
siders or with some of the playwrights who 
presumed to write for a stage that was sup- 
plied by " university wits " with its prin- 
cipal pieces. But Shakespeare's own express 
avowal, in the dedication of his poem on 
Venus and Adonis (1593), that that poem is 
the " first heir of his invention," precludes us 



SHAKESPEARE 179 

from believing that before that date he had 
composed an entire play of his own. That 
declaration we cannot rationally refuse to 
accept ; and only in the light of it can we 
understand the nature of his early work. 

In almost all of the plays presumably pro- 
duced before 1595 we actually find, as it 
happens, evidences of variety of composition. 
In Love's Lahoufs Lost, supposed to be his 
first comedy, there is a quantity of matter 
which points to outside collaboration, and 
might conceivably have been furnished by 
the young actor's patron, Lord Southampton, 
and his friends. The phrase " Priscian, a 
little scratched," as a comment on false 
Latin, would have come strangely from a 
youth who had left school about fourteen or 
fifteen, and who had, by the testimony of 
Jonson, " small Latin and less Greek." In 
the early Comedy of Errors we observe marked 
differences of versification in the first act, 
the opening scene being written in mechani- 
cally regular " end-stopped " verse, with 
exactly ten syllables, save in three instances ; 
while in the second we have " double " or 
" feminine " endings, that is, extra syllables, 
in 25 out of 103 lines. In the Two Gentlemen 
of Verona, also an early play, the father of 
Proteus appears in the first act, and never 
again ; and Proteus is sent with others " to 
salute the emperor," who is not again heard 
of. Apparently there has been reconstruc- 



180 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

tion, perhaps a combination of two plots. 
As the play stands, it is visibly curtailed in 
the denouement, where, further, a transcriber's 
or a printer's error has put into the mouth 
of Valentine two impossible lines, belonging 
to another character. On the theme of 
Romeo and Juliet, yet again, we know there 
was a play before 1560 ; and this, there is 
reason to think, was built upon by Shake- 
speare, probably through an intermediary 
adaptation. As the play stands, independent 
critics have been impressed by the presence 
of different styles, though no one doubts that 
the really fine work is Shakespeare's. 

There is now little doubt, further, though 
there is not unanimity, concerning the non- 
Shakespearean character of the first part of 
Henry VI, and the presence of much of other 
men's work in the second and third parts, 
which are obviously adaptations from two 
earlier plays, still extant. Similarly, the 
Taming of the Shrew, which was preceded by 
a Taming of a Shrew, is itself in the main 
pre-Shakespearean, the master-hand being 
doubtfully traceable only — if at all — in the ^ 
Katherine and Petruchio scenes, which are 
at most worked over by him. 

Such being the young playwright's practice 
at his outset, we are warned to surmise that 
in the later plays, in which he more or less 
completely gives us his own work, he is still, as 
a rule or often, rewriting old plots. His Fal- 



SHAKESPEARE 181 

staff we know to have been superimposed on 
a previous figure which, to the expressed dis- 
content of the descendants, was named after 
the famous Lollard Sir Thomas Oldcastle ; 
and the whole double play of Henry IV is 
presumptively a recast. It is hardly possible 
that Shakespeare originally planned the ill- 
conceived and jarring scene of Prince Henry's 
donning of the crown, or, indeed, the loose 
movement of the whole, though his hand has 
everywhere been laid on the verse and on 
the prose comedy. But even the latter was 
wrought piecemeal ; Mrs. Quickly being a 
wife in the first part and a widow of long 
standing in the second, though there has been 
no break in the continuity of the action, and 
no mention of the hostess's change of status. 
King John, in turn, is a rewriting of The 
Troublesome Raigne of King John, which, in 
the main, was probably the work of Lodge. 
There is a presumption that even Richard II 
is a recast of an older play, perhaps written 
by Peele, of whom there are traces in the 
diction ; and there are various reasons for 
thinking that Julius Ccesar, in which the style 
is so often suggestive of other hands, is a re- 
construction by Shakespeare of a previous 
play which may have been in two parts — 
possibly that which we know to have been 
written for Henslowe in 1602 by Dekker, 
Drayton, Munday, Webster, and Middleton. 
In the case of Hamlet we know beyond 



182 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

reasonable doubt that there was a previous 
play by Thomas Kyd, written at least as early 
as 1588 ; and of this earlier work there are 
some apparent traces in the pirated First 
Quarto of 1602. Again, with regard to the 
Merchant of Venice, we know from Stephen 
Gosson's School of Abuse that as early as 
1579 there was on the stage a play containing 
something like the casket scene, and based 
on the Shylock motive. King Lear, in turn, 
we know to be a complete recomposition on 
the main motive of an older King Leir and 
his Three Daughters ; and it is probable that 
both Othello and Macbeth were similarly sug- 
gested by previous dramas. Not till Corio- 
lanus (1608) do we certainly have a tragedy 
primarily composed by Shakespeare from 
mere book-material, as As You Like It had 
been framed upon Lodge's prose story of 
Rosalynde. Measure for Measure (1604), we 
know, builds upon the Promos and Cassandra 
of Whetstone, with probably another play 
between ; and the chances are that The Two 
Gentlemen, Much Ado about Nothing, and 
AWs Well that ends Well, were founded upon 
previous plays by Greene. It is here that the 
challenge of Greene's champion in 1594 be- 
comes pressing. These are the plays in our 
Shakespeare which are most likely to have 
been of Greene's planning as regards their 
plots ; and if we disregard the challenge in 
respect of them, on the score that we have no 



SHAKESPEARE 183 

direct evidence on the subject, we in effect 
ignore it altogether as regards Shakespeare, 
the only playwright to whom it appears to 
point at all clearly. There are really strong 
grounds for regarding these plays as adapta- 
tions, however superior may be the execution 
to the common run of Greene's. The most 
carefully finished of all the comedies. Twelfth 
Night, is the most homogeneous in style and 
matter ; but we cannot say that its plot- 
motives were of Shakespeare's framing. The 
motive of a brother and a sister masquerading 
in male clothes, and that of the disguised girl 
serving as page to the man she loves — already 
used in the Two Gentlemen — ^were standing 
conventions in continental fiction, and must 
have been long familiar on the stage. 

There is still a natural reluctance to face 
the fact of all this indebtedness on the part 
of the supreme dramatist to a number of his 
predecessors for both themes and character- 
types. But the recognition of the debt really 
puts in a clearer light the greatness of the 
faculty which so marvellously transmuted 
common clay into so much of fine gold ; and 
it reduces to intelligibility at the same time 
the otherwise occult process of the production 
of such a mass of fine and great work in a 
few years by an actor of no great culture, 
and presumably without the leisure for such 
a variety of reading and knowledge as would 
be required for the initiation of such a multi- 



184. ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

tude of plots. To know Shakespeare, we 
must think of him as the actor-partner cater- 
ing for his company, concerned primarily to 
find themes and frame plots that will " draw," 
and driven alike by his genius and by his 
experience as an actor to make the characters 
lifelike. To the poetic declamation which 
the age and the blank-verse form demanded, 
he was trained by his years of work on the 
boards ; and in that form he rapidly deve- 
loped a mastery of rhythm that left all his 
contemporaries behind. But he is no less 
their superior in sheer play-making, Alike in 
poetry, in perception of character, and in the 
eye for dramatic effect, he soon far excelled 
them all ; though he learned not a little from 
others even to the end. The opening scene in 
the second part of Henry IV, in which the 
fears of Northumberland are alternately laid 
and stirred, till the crushing truth is reached, 
makes a kind of psychic effect at which 
previous Tudor dramatists had never even 
aimed ; and the character-drawing in the 
part of Shallow, done for its own sake, is no 
less an innovation by the new master. Lack- 
ing as he did the university culture which 
in some degree had been enjoyed by most of 
them, he rather gained than lost thereby, 
being thrown for his training upon his own 
powers and the living models with which he 
was supplied, whereas they had been biased 
by their schooling, and were untrained to 



SHAKESPEARE 185 

meet the real needs of the stage. But in 
sheer power of reflection alike upon art and 
upon life he was also gifted beyond their 
scope. Always he transcends them in crafts- 
manship and verisimilitude no less than in 
force and delicacy. Taking over from Greene 
or Peele plots which no manipulation could 
make wholly satisfactory, he still produces 
something more coherent as well as more 
delightful than anything left by either of 
them ; and whereas Greene gave him a real 
lead in respect of his woman characters in 
two or three plays, Shakespeare from the first 
exhibits a relative mastery in that kind, even 
in working over other men's draughts. The 
girls in the Two Gentlemen and the Midsummer 
Nighfs Dream, the women in the Comedy of 
Errors, are in their comparatively slight way 
drawn with an original sureness of touch ; 
and soon, in Juliet and Beatrice and Portia, 
he has far surpassed his predecessor. 

His full superiority can best be realized by 
studying first a great play in which he was 
hampered by his raw material, and next one 
in which he put the model aside and took only 
the theme, working it out for himself. In 
Hamlet, the most famous of his plays, he was 
certainly hampered by the previous tragedy 
of Kyd, which he recast. In that, the assumed 
madness of the hero, remotely derived from 
an old saga, was matter for mirth, as mad- 
ness always was to the rude and crude Eliza- 



186 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

bethan audience ; and the added madness of 
Ophelia would serve the same purpose. The 
first he turns to truly tragic ends, and the 
second he makes matter of pity and tears, 
even as he had subtly touched with new 
sympathy his presentment of the contemned 
and vindictive Jew in the Merchant of Venice. 
In point of delicacy and vividness of character 
delineation, it need hardly be said, Hamlet 
transcends all previous tragedy : the por- 
traiture is as freshly powerful as the versifica- 
tion. Still there remain incongruities in- 
volved in the structure of the original. Ham- 
let's brutal words over the slain Polonius, 
and his savage motive for sparing the praying 
King, remain on the old barbaric plane ; and 
the placing of the "To be " soliloquy, with 
its reverie on the " undiscovered country," 
after the scenes in which Hamlet has actu- 
ally met the " returned traveller," tells of 
readjustment which missed coherence. The 
barbaric plot discords with the brooding 
psychology which now pervades it. Perhaps 
in Othello, where again the characterization 
surpasses in intensity everything done by 
previous men, the perplexity aroused as to 
the motives of lago is similarly to be accounted 
for by a crude original ; though we cannot 
be sure that Shakespeare had not known 
" Italianate " devils of lago's brand. In any 
case the plot is likely to be borrowed, even if 
refined upon : it is on the side of plot struc- 



SHAKESPEARE 187 

ture that Shakespeare is least original ; and 
that of Othello is impossibly " telescoped " as 
it stands. It is in the astonishing lifelikeness 
of the great scenes ; in the new mimetic 
imagination seen at work in such touches as 
Emilia's reiterated question " My husband ? " 
that the player reveals his mastery in his craft. 
But in Lear, the most overpowering tragedy 
of the modern world, we see him refusing 
even to be trammelled by other men's designs. 
The old Leir is quite a tolerable play for its 
time, the fairly mature work, it may be, of 
Kyd and Lodge. But Shakespeare about 
1605 was in a mood which spurned their 
mixture of serious comedy and farce. He 
simply took the legendary motive and put 
the old play in the waste-paper basket, 
creating a new tale in which evil and good 
clash and grapple with an intensity of action 
and feeling which would have shrivelled up 
the first framework. Here there are no 
ambiguities. The poet's vision plays with a 
terrible lucidity on all the passions of all 
the characters : the erring Lear is dashed on 
destruction by his own ungovernable tempera- 
ment ; the noble Cordelia abets the tragedy 
by the hereditary obstinacy in which alone 
she is of kin with her house ; the good pay 
their penalties even as do the wicked ; and in 
the frightful comment of Edgar in the fifth 
act on the penalty of his blinded father we 
seem to see Shakespeare for once thrown from 



188 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

the poise of sanity in a flash of fierce scorn of 
all human folly, his own perhaps included. 

In that mood he might well do his part in 
Timon — a play in which he has collaborated 
with or incompletely revised another man, 
as he did in Pericles. But in Coriolanus we 
see him again bent on taking elbow-room for 
his own genius, with the result that on the 
basis of Plutarch he builds another great 
artistic whole, wherein nearly every character 
is limned with a masterly power ; and the 
central figure tells with more than Marlowe's 
force the great tragic truth, " 'Tis in ourselves 
that we are thus or thus." Framed as it was 
without any intermediary model, this play 
serves equally with Lear to reveal the dramatic 
supremacy of Shakespeare. In that, he had 
discarded the types of the play which sug- 
gested his, utterly eclipsing them from the 
start : in this, turning a classic narrative 
into drama, he visualizes and vitalizes his 
personages as no dramatist had ever done 
before. With perhaps the exception of Tullus 
Aufidius, whose psychology was probably 
meant to be illuminated by the temperament 
of the actor, they stand out like so many 
studies of actual people, varying in tone and 
manner even as in character. The two con- 
trasted types of Volumnia and Virgilia, the 
mother and the wife of Coriolanus, are not to 
be matched even in Shakespeare's gallery for 
the swift certainty w^ith which they are con- 



SHAKESPEARE 189 

ceived and portrayed ; and in the former 
there is forced upon us with a subtle insistence 
something that Plutarch did not tell, the 
part played by the high-spirited and high- 
minded yet unwise mother in fostering her 
son's imperious spirit up to the point at 
which it so masters his life that she is in the 
end forced to be his destroyer, to save him 
from himself. Her complete unconsciousness 
of the nature of her work, alike in the past and 
in the crowning crisis, is a new conception in 
the way of criticism of life ; and it is wrought 
out in wholly dramatic fashion, without a 
word of comment from the dramatist, who 
leaves us to read his revelation as we read 
that of life itself. 

In comparison with Volumnia, Virgilia 
seems at first a supererogatory creation, vividly 
sketched in for the sheer love of character- 
drawing. She is powerless to affect the 
action ; yet she is characterized in the third 
scene of the first act, with the most perfect 
clearness, as at once wholly womanly in con- 
trast with her masterful mother-in-law, and 
still gently determined to go her own way in 
her own sphere. In reality she is a profoundly 
conceived foil to the other. The mother 
dominates and misguides ; the devoted wife, 
the " gracious silence," lovingly complies and 
cannot save. Tragedy has here become some- 
thing deeper than a series of tragic events : 
it is a whole aspect of life. 



190 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

It was probably a circumstantial accident 
that gave us, in addition to those incompar- 
able portraits of women, yet a third, that of 
Valeria, who, though she briefly figures in 
Plutarch, has strictly nothing to do with the 
action of the play save to suggest anew, by 
her account of the boy Marcius, how even 
admirable women may miseducate children. 
(Shakespeare is careful to insist on her 
nobility and charm by putting a warm 
eulogium of her in the mouth of Coriolanus ; 
but he had before introduced her as enjoying 
the episode of the child rending a butterfly 
in pieces. The detail may have been sug- 
gested to him by Montaigne, who makes 
earnest comment upon matters of the kind in 
regard to education. ) As all female parts were 
then played by boys, and there are three 
women characters on the stage at once, alike 
in Lear, in Coriolanus, and in Antony and 
Cleopatra, we know that the company then 
had three boys available, and that Valeria 
was thus made a possible character in the 
Roman play. But the man who drew her and 
Volumnia and Virgilia was beyond question 
deeply interested in women as personalities. 

Antony is probably a little later than 
Coriolanus ; and it completes the testimony 
to its author's creative mastery at the mature 
height of his power. Here again, he works 
directly upon the narrative of Plutarch, fol- 
lowing it at times with even an unnecessary 



SHAKESPEARE 191 

fidelity, at times disregarding it pointedly, 
and creating or developing personalities at 
will. Here we can follow his artistic pro- 
cesses, and the lines of his interests. The 
Cleopatra of the opening scenes is wholly of 
his making, and is sketched in deliberate dis- 
regard of some later accounts by Plutarch of 
her way of seeking to hold Antony : while the 
later scene of her fury with the messenger 
who tells of Antony's marriage is wholly in- 
vented, albeit in terms of the idea of Cleopatra 
supplied by Plutarch towards the close. 
Other figures who are little more than names 
in the history are similarly incarnated : the 
Iras and Charmian of the second scene are of 
the dramatist's shaping and colouring ; and 
the keen Enobarbus, of whom Plutarch tells 
almost nothing save the bare episode of his 
desertion, pardon, and death, is an indepen- 
dent creation, serving as a foil, a commen- 
tator, and a companion figure to Antony 
throughout. Lepidus, again, who is but a 
nam.e in Plutarch, is dramatically exhibited 
as a nullity ; while the drinking scene of the 
triumvirs, like the jesting-scene of the maids, 
is invented to meet English tastes. Much of 
the action did not admit of reproduction ; 
and its variety vetoed any such unity of 
structure as is achieved in Coriolanus ; but 
the ever-changing scene is charged with an 
incomparable wealth of life ; and in the great 
central figures of the powerful animal man 



192 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

and woman, neither good nor wholly bad, 
yet both splendid in death, we have present- 
ments of humanity as vividly interesting as 
Hamlet's self. 

Already we are past the day of Elizabeth ; 
and in his closing years, writing the Winter^ s 
Tale and Cymheline, with their developed plot- 
interest, we seem to see the prematurely aging 
playwright rather wistfully taking up the 
plot-methods of the younger men, yet still 
with an art transcending theirs as much in 
veracity as in beauty, even when he subor- 
dinates truth of tragedy to the popular crav- 
ing for a " happy ending/' 

The Tempest cannot be, as men would fain 
have it, his last work. Its versification is not 
of his very latest : that is to be seen in his 
portions of Henry VIII (in which he colla- 
borated with Fletcher), in Cymbeline, and in 
the Winter^ s Tale, In the Tempest he placed 
the most majestic lines he ever wrote : in the 
later plays he has so far recoiled from the 
" end-stopped " verse of his youth, and is 
so unconcerned about smoothness of diction, 
that he becomes frequently obscure by excess 
of concision, and makes it doubly easy for us, 
in the Henry VIII, to separate his close- 
wrought and vibrating verse from the many 
monotonous sets of lines ending in dissyllables, 
so often quoted as his with uncritical praise. 
But in the Winter's Tale, where the old tragic 
power is allayed by an indulgent kindliness, 



SHAKESPEARE 193 

as of a tired old man entertaining maidens, 
he preserves not only his astonishing veri- 
similitude of impersonation, but his power 
to bleni words with a beauty which seems 
to transmute them into music. Cymbeline, as 
a whole, tells unmistakably of failing powers ; 
yet is the figure of Imogen beyond the reach 
of any other poet of the age. In no serious 
play of his, indeed, is the note of greatness 
lacking. When Timon and Pericles are de- 
nuded of their alien material, as has been 
vigilantly done by Mr. Fleay, they stand 
almost on a level with the second-best plays, 
so fine and firm is the workmanship. Even in 
the Troilus and Cressida, a baffling and dis- 
concerting play * in which the far-ofi Homeric 
world is perversely transposed to the key of 
Elizabethan intrigue and envious rivalry and 
turbulent self-seeking, as if in Aristophanic 
derision of Chapman's hero-worship — even 
here, where again other men's work seems to 
have given him his lead, the poet bestows 
on us some of his finest didactic verse, clothed 
in his richest diction ; and in the title- 
characters he triumphantly reveals his un- 
matched power alike of pitiless and pathetic 
portraiture. 

Still on the seeds of all he made, 
The rose of beauty bums. 

* It is now certain that this play was not new 
when published in 1609. It was probably written 
or adapted about 1599. 

13 



194 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Our praise, indeed, applies mainly to his 
dramas. It is one of the puzzles of literature 
that this master of great rhythm and intensely 
concentrated dramatic utterance should have 
first sought and won fame by the publication 
of two long rhymed poems which even in that 
age of diffuse poetry are notable no less for 
their prolixity than for their sheer smooth 
fluency. Had he left nothing but the Venus 
and the Lucrece, we could not really have 
known that he possessed genius, so wanting 
are they in nearly all that makes his plays 
immortal. He would seem indeed to have 
written them by way of earning sometliing 
in a year in which the plague, closing the 
theatres, suspended his ordinary means of 
living. So produced, they yet won him 
instant fame in his day, so easily did he frame 
what his public cared for. The far more 
memorable Sonnets, in nearly all of which he 
so easily excels most of the contemporary 
practitioners of that form, and rivals the best, 
were clearly not meant for publication, though 
the problem of their origin remains unsolved 
save by conflicting hypotheses ; and for the 
rest we have but a few doubtful poems from 
him, published with some certainly not his, 
to reveal his lyric faculty, apart from the songs 
scattered through the plays. These, so ex- 
quisite at their best, he seems to have penned 
simply for their stage purpose. The ethereal 
lines : 



SHAKESPEARE 195 

Nothing of him that doth fade 
But doth suffer a sea change 
Into something rich and strange, 

and the "Take, oh take those Hps away," were 
for this magician things by the way, fortuities 
of his main tasks. There is something stag- 
gering in the reflection that those tasks them- 
selves were the outcome rather of the need to 
hve than of the need to sing. 

This is the explanation of much of the com- 
parative triviality of some of his early work. 
The doctrine (fulminated by Jonson and 
Chapman and held by Bacon) that the drama 
was properly a means of edification, never 
troubled Shakespeare. He had not sought 
the theatre with missionary motives. From 
the first, his instinctive judgment withheld 
him from the graver stage sins against good 
feeling ; but for the rest he was minded to 
move and entertain by his art, not to edify 
by his explicit teaching, apart from the spon- 
taneous moralizings which fitted his person- 
ages to their situations. And so he makes his 
clowns pun for punning's sake, and splash 
in ribaldry for gross mirth's sake, because 
that was the popular taste of the time ; and 
provides farcial relief to comedy, comic relief 
to tragedy, because the audiences so willed it. 
It was only at the height of his power that, 
in a much deepened mood, his sheer genius 
for verisimilitude, his spontaneous concern to 
hold a mirror up to nature, moved him to 



196 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

turn the very Fool into a new recruit of 
tragedy, and to transcend at length even the 
chosen plane of poetic diction, on which he 
distanced all rivalry, with Lear's " Prithee, 
undo this button." Pressures of fortune, as 
it happens now and then, had sent to his 
true task a genius who was to be made one 
of the great artists of all time. 

We have the more occasion to be thankful 
for the chance. Save for his manifold handi- 
work, ranging from the most joyous mirth 
to the darkest tragedy, we should never have 
known the possibilities of English poetic 
drama. Without him, we feel, the loud wild 
world of the Elizabethan stage would have 
lacked the most precious of its lights, its 
clearest sunshine and the starry sanity with 
which he enspheres its tragic night. None 
of them all could vie with him in the realiza- 
tion of the immanence of evil in life : their 
darkest pictures suggest rather a violent 
extraction of horrors for horror's sake, where 
in his hands goodness and sin alike seem part 
of the natural process of things. Yet no less 
had he excelled in his early power of steep- 
ing life in radiance : the faculty which could 
carry romantic comedy to the height of happi- 
ness was that which, turning away from joy, 
carried tragedy to the verge of emotional 
endurance, and yet again, in the last phase of 
its creative power, gave us both the light and 
the shadow in the balance of the large vision 



SHAKESPEARE 197 

which sees all. No other writer, in any litera- 
ture, has exhibited this catholicity of sym- 
pathy. Over and above all, he is the supreme 
master of blank-verse rhythm, so possessing 
it that hundreds of his lines, after the hun- 
dredth reading, yield us an " unspent beauty 
of surprise." But for him, we should not 
have known what the chance-made instrument 
could achieve. And still he is but the greatest 
master in a unique school, growing from it 
and relating to it in his faults even as in his 
excellences. 

His superiority alike to his contemporaries 
and his successors, which is apt to be made a 
theme of rather barren wonderment, should 
hint to us that the full force of the contrast 
depends partly on the special circumstances. 
Merely to say that never since has such genius 
existed is at once to go beyond our real warrant 
and to miss recognition of some of the most 
relevant facts. It is quite true that no such 
combination of poetic and dramatic power 
as Shakespeare's has ever recurred in the 
drama ; but it does not follow that such genius 
has never since potentially existed. It is 
important to realize that even a second 
Shakespeare in almost any subsequent period, 
certainly in our own day, would be debarred 
from bestowing on his work such literary 
splendour as blazes from the great tragedies 
of the great master. Not only is the great 
poetry often dramatically supererogatory even 



198 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

when the poetic form is taken for granted — 
so much can be established by comparing 
highly poetic scenes with others where fine 
poetry was equally admissible, but is not forth- 
coming — the very conduct of the play at 
times transcends the plane of drama proper. 
Charles Lamb was quite right in saying that 
Lear transcends the stage. To say nothing of 
the idealization of evil qua evil in the terrific 
personalities of Regan, Goneril, and Edmund, 
the tremendous scene of Lear's madness in 
the storm is capable only of a mental realiza- 
tion. To reply that so great a master of 
stagecraft as Shakespeare would never have 
put upon the stage more than it could carry 
is not merely to beg the question, but to ignore 
the instances in which he himself can be seen 
to have retrenched parts of his work as being 
perceptibly out of the dramatic orbit. Lear 
was not written in a mood of cool aesthetic 
calculation ; and in point of fact the back- 
grounding of the tempest of Lear's soul with 
a tempest in nature is a psychological master- 
stroke which defies concrete representation. 
Either the physical storm or the actor must 
give way, for physical reasons. So great an 
actor as Salvini, superbly fitted in voice and 
person as in power of passion to carry off the 
scene, failed at this point to attain the imagin- 
able effect : actor and audience alike felt the 
physical overstrain set up by the unearthly 
climax. 



SHAKESPEARE 199 

But this very scene is for the reader one of 
the crowning manifestations of Shakespeare's 
power ; and its production was made possible 
only by the general openness of the Eliza- 
bethan stage to all manner of experiment, and 
by Shakespeare's own position of authority 
in his company. Modern drama, in com- 
mercial theatres, is conditioned by the need 
for long " runs " to cover large expenses : 
Shakespeare was free, within the limits of 
his own discretion, to load a play with purely 
literary value to an extent which modern 
managers could not permit. Above all, he 
had the stimulus of the free poetic form, 
which not only allowed but demanded beauty 
and force of diction for diction's sake. And 
this gives us one of our clues to his work in 
some doubtful cases. It would be strange 
if any lesser man could have so copied his 
voice as to give us those " Shakespearean " 
passages in The Two Noble Kinsmen and Sir 
Thomas More which so many critics have felt 
to be his. But sometimes there is no room 
for doubt. In Pericles^ so much of which 
as it stands is impossibly bad for him, 
there are expressions which we know could 
only be his. A great living master, the 
author of Typhoon, has in that story em- 
ployed pages of admirable description to 
express the sheer immensity of the uproar 
of a hurricane, in which a cry shouted in 
a comrade's ear is as a remote murmur. 



200 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

In Pericles the idea is put in a line and a 
half : 

The seaman's whistle 
Is as a whisper in the ear of death. 
Unheard. 

This is the lion's claw : no other man could so 
strike with words ; and effects such as these, 
impossible in our modern realistic drama, but 
main items in our conception of Shakespeare, 
are specialities of the art form in which he is 
the supreme executant. 



CHAPTER IX 

PROSE FICTION 

It is a somewhat puzzling fact that the kind 
of literature which seems to us most naturally 
popular should have made comparatively 
small progress, either as to quantity or as to 
quality, in a period in which we have seen 
poetry and prose, and above all, poetic drama, 
so rapidly developing in power and vogue. 
In our own day, prose fiction has many times 
more readers than either poetry or history. 
In the England of Elizabeth there was but 
little prose fiction to read, and that little was 
not to be compared with the current drama 
either in psychological or in narrative interest. 
But the special problem merges in a larger 
one. Prose fiction was a late development 



PROSE FICTION 201 

in ancient as in modern literature ; and its 
advance was slow for more than a century 
after the death of Elizabeth. In an age 
abounding in action and adventure, the novel 
of action and adventure was little attempted ; 
and in an age much given to dramatic 
psychology the psychological novel hardly 
emerges. Not till the eighteenth century 
were the English to have Robinson Crusoe, 
The Vicar of Wakefield^ and Clarissa : and 
not till the nineteenth were the French to 
have Dumas or Balzac. It is clear that either 
psychological or economic influences stood in 
the way of, or were lacking to promote, the 
systematic development of the prose tale or 
romance. 

In the early Tudor days, men read the 
Morte d^ Arthur, Huon of Bordeaux, and Guy 
of Warwick very much as they read chronicles 
or the Lyf of Charles the Grete, though from 
Caxton onwards there were many avowals of 
the dubiety of such quasi-histories. These 
early French romances have indeed a charm 
of concreteness and of artless movement to 
which we can still turn with zest ; but the 
real novelist for that age, alike for character- 
drawing and for narrative, would seem to 
have been Chaucer, who had freely drawn 
upon and transcended the tale-tellers of 
Southern Europe. At a time when Chaucer's 
metre was no longer understood, it would 
seem a simple thing for a prose-writer to have 



202 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

sought after Chaucerian narrative effects in 
a medium which reheved him of the burdens of 
rhyme and metre, especially when there were 
current translations from Boccaccio to point 
the way. But though the translations multi- 
plied, the response in native invention re- 
mained slight and unsatisfactory, 

A large part of the explanation lies in the 
simple economic circumstances. In Shake- 
speare's day only a minority of men, and only 
a small number of women, could read ; while 
the drama had an economic basis alike in the 
reading class and in the large class of illiterates, 
for whom the drama was a gateway to a sem- 
blance of historical and other knowledge as 
well as to entertainment. There was thus 
a constant demand for new plays ; and the 
playwrights, if ill-paid, were at least always 
being tempted to produce ; while no man 
could hope by writing tales to make a living 
— the chief motive to novel-writing in later 
periods. But the psychic circumstances were 
also unfavourable to rapid development in 
fiction. Drama was bound in its own nature 
to attain to something of method, order, and 
brevity if it was to live. The French cycles 
which took eight days to play were out of 
the question for the London theatres ; and 
the "two hours' traffic of our stage" meant 
an ordered plot, in which things happened 
consecutively and significantly, making a 
coherent and intelligible whole. Character- 



PROSE FICTION 203 

painting was part of the economy of the pro- 
cess ; and the actor's art made a constant 
appeal for its development, and for the 
subordination to it of the discursive poetry 
which was the main obstacle to dramatic 
realism. But the tale-teller who could not 
invent new and good plots, and who relied on 
a string of episodes and conversations, lay 
under no saving check from circumstance, 
and was inevitably unprepared to make the 
brooding study of life which alone can yield 
great work in fiction form. Thus the prose 
tale, taken over by English literature from 
the large stores of Italy and France, led to 
no such native growth as took place in drama. 
Some development there was, but it was 
mainly unfortunate and impermanent. 

Shortly before Elizabeth's accession there 
was produced The Hundred Merry Tales 
(1557) a translation of Les Cent Nouvelles 
Nouvelles, the long popularity of which is 
attested by Beatrice in Much Ado about 
Nothing ; and about ten years later there 
appeared the collection known as Painter's 
Palace of Pleasure (1566-7), wherein are 
translated a hundred and one tales, some 
thirty-six from the classics ; some forty from 
the Italian of Boccaccio and Bandello, mainly 
by way of the French of Belleforest ; and 
the rest chiefly from Queen Margaret's Hep- 
tameron. Between Painter's start and the 
year 1583, there appeared seven other similar 



204 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

collections, some of which ran into several 
editions, being helped thereto by Ascham's 
vigorous vilification of the species ; but the 
Palace of Pleasure is by far the largest, and is 
in every way the most important. 

Painter's compilation, which by its proffer 
of plots deeply and decisively influenced the 
Elizabethan drama, contains much that is at 
a higher level of moral and literary effort 
than the generally improper Merry Tales of 
France, including as it does not only Da 
Porto's immortal tale of Romeo and Juliet 
(recast and not improved by Bandello), but 
a number in which the characters of the 
personages form the pivot of the story. These 
character-studies are indeed rather crude in 
their kind, running to extreme cases of self- 
will and self-abnegation; but to the novel 
of character, of which they are among the 
first essays, they distinctly belong. Yet, be- 
longing though they mostly do to the four- 
teenth and fifteenth centuries, they remain 
above the plane of the English prose fiction 
of the Elizabethan age. Boccaccio's De- 
cameron represented the fruitage of whole 
centuries of the multiplex civilization of the 
Italian republics, with a further culling from 
that of Byzantium, purveyed by exiles from 
Constantinople, and large draughts from the 
old fabliaux of France, in which Boccaccio 
was only too well grounded through his early 
sojourn in Paris. Chaucer in the fourteenth 



PROSE FICTION 205 

century was quite abreast of the psychology 
of Boccaccio's narrative poems ; and he told 
in Troilus and Criseyde the story of a great 
passion more subtly and tenderly than it is 
told in Boccaccio's poem on the same theme, 
Filostrato, or even in his powerful prose 
romance of Fiammetta ; but upon Chaucer's 
age there had followed a century of storm 
and strife, in which English literature had 
stagnated and eddied like a stopped stream. 
Poetry recovered and drama leaped up under 
Elizabeth, but not so the art of narrative 
fiction. 

Italian influence is ostensibly present in the 
first native novel of the age, George Gas- 
coigne's The Adventures of Master F, J., later 
entitled The Pleasant Fable of Ferdinando 
Jeronimi and Leonora de Velasco, translated 
out of the Italian Tales of Bartello, written 
about 1571, and first published in 1573. 
Apropos of its title, it has to be said that it 
is not pleasant, it is not a fable, and it is not 
translated from the Italian, Bartello being a 
myth. But it is a notable performance. It 
is remarked concerning Gascoigne, whom we 
have already met with as an early poet, that 
he wrote " the first prose tale of modern life, 
the first prose comedy, the first tragedy trans- 
lated from the Italian, the first maske, the 
first regular satire, the first treatise on poetry 
in English." All this is in itself remarkable : 
and while the other " firsts " are chiefly 



206 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

memorable as being such, the Adventures of 
F. J. in its sinister fashion has a somewhat 
arresting quahty. It is a corrupt and withal 
a confused narrative, strongly suggesting a 
garbled version of an actual intrigue in Eng- 
land ; but it is written simply, sanely, and 
swiftly, with a directness of aim in striking 
contrast with the discursive ways of Lilly and 
Greene. It was in Gascoigne to have become 
an artist had he been less of a knave, and had 
his fortunes left him less free to be a^dilettante. 
His women have a touch of actuality which 
in those of Greene and Lilly, if ever per- 
ceptible, is lost in the rattle of their euphuistic 
rhetoric. 

Lilly's two Euphues books (1579-80), 
loaded as they are with disquisition, have to 
be estimated as novels ; and in that aspect 
they are most charitably to be recognized as 
the work of a young man of five-and-twenty, 
inevitably handicapped by his lack of deep 
experience. Over every page is the trail of 
the " ciever-young-mannishness " that has 
been complained of in the early comedies of 
Shakespeare. The main plot of the first re- 
solves itself into the tale of the winning away 
of Lucilla, the fiancee of Philautus, by his 
friend Euphues, who in turn is jilted by 
Lucilla for a third suitor. The lady, if ever 
seen in life, is not made intelligible in the 
story, being a mere violently-pulled puppet 
whose figure death itself cannot make tragic ; 



PROSE FICTION 207 

and the men, who quarrel coarsely, are no 
more attractive or interesting than she is. 
There is thus nothing to redeem the insupport- 
able hail of artificial simile, antithesis, allitera- 
tion, and classical allusion, which pelts on till 
the maddened reader is fain to cry with mine 
host in Chaucer, " No more of this ! " To find 
any enduring interest in the book, we must 
fasten on the included treatises, of which 
that dealing with education is substantially^ 
copied from Plutarch, but which among them 
give some notion of the culture-life of Eliza- 
bethan England. 

The second book, Ewpkues and his England, 
is dedicated to " the ladies and gentel women 
of England " as well as to the " gentelmen 
readers " appealed to in the 1581 edition of 
the first. The ladies had indeed small cause 
to be delighted with that ; but in the second 
they are more agreeably dealt with. Still 
there is no valid characterization : the women 
characters are described, never presented ; 
and their harangues are as tediously didactic, 
as impossibly artificial, if not so monstrously 
protracted as those of the men. The story, 
if it can be so called, is in fact little more 
than a series of harangues, varied by didactic 
or disputatious epistles and by narratives in 
which A tells the instructive tale of B, who 
is almost immediately made to begin an 
edifying tale of C. There is no advance in 
fictive art on the Anatomy of Wit ; the herbs 



208 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

and birds and stones pullulate as before ; and 
as in the Anatomy we end by fastening on the 
included treatises, so in Euphues and his Eng- 
land we are fain to find our interest in the 
final Euphues^ Glass for Europe, in which 
description of England and her inhabitants 
lapses into harangue, like everything else in 
the volume. Euphues, in short, was but a 
nine years' wonder for an immature world ; 
incapable of constituting a good school either 
of style or of fiction, though the editions 
went on at intervals down to 1636. It had 
pains and cleverness enough spent on it to 
make a great book ; but for lack of real 
genius and human insight it remains but a 
monument of wrong art, tolerable only on the 
score that the art of the rest of the world in 
that field was mostly no better. 

Infelicitous as was the experiment of Lilly 
(who never tried again in fiction), the no less 
famous attempt of Sir Philip Sidney, The 
Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, was hardly 
more durable. When posthumously pub- 
lished in 1590 it took the wind out of the sails 
of Euphues, and it kept its vogue longer, in 
virtue of being less irksome in style and 
more various in its attempts at human in- 
terest. But Sidney, scribbling his romantic 
medley for the entertainment of his sister, at 
the age of twenty-five or twenty-six, made 
like Lilly (though certainly riper than he) 
the mistake of dabbling in fiction before he 



PROSE FICTION 209 

had adequately studied life and character ; 
and, like him, employed stiff artistic con- 
ventions for the presentment of an infinitely 
difficult and delicate subject-matter. It is 
always to be remembered, indeed, that he 
had no design of publication, and actually ex- 
pressed the wish that his manuscript should 
be destroyed. The intellectual modesty 
which graces the critical confidence of the 
Apology for Poetry was indeed such as 
could reveal to him that great books are not 
to be produced as pastimes. But for that 
age the Arcadia was even more of an event 
than the Euphues ; and the beloved memory 
of Sidney escaped the rebound of alert criti- 
cism which soon fell upon the fame of Lilly. 
As we have noted, Sidney's Arcadia is 
primarily inspired by the old romance of 
Ileliodorus, then coming into European know- 
ledge. For the rest, it looks to previous 
continental " pastorals " and to the romances 
of chivalry ; never attaining to any new and 
vital conception of the art of narrative in- 
vention. Behind the pseudo-classic names 
which help to keep the story out of any his- 
torical frame there is indeed some play of 
the actual human passions which filled the 
stage of life in England as abundantly as 
elsewhere ; and there is often a certain 
vivacity in the narrative of the emotional 
passages which arouses in a modern reader 
the hope of hearing the right word, the 

14 



210 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

genuine utterance of human feeling. But the 
hope is always deferred by the fluent prolixity 
of the narrative, and the fatal facility with 
which all the characters alike turn feeling | 
into declamation. Had Sidney lived to wit- 
ness the great drama that grew out of the 
rude beginnings which repelled him, he would 
haply have realized the might of simplicity 
and naturalness : as it is, his traditions keep 
him much less realistic, much more essentially 
rhetorical in prose dialogue than are the 
later dramatists in their blank verse. 

As to episode, he is far behind Heliodorus, 
who, doubtless proceeding upon a previous 
evolution of narrative technique, skilfully 
keeps up a continuous thread of interest 
through an abundance of relevant and excit- 
ing incident. In short, the Arcadia is to be 
read not for its interest as a novel, but for 
the historic and literary interest it sets up 
as a vigorous experiment by a powerful mind, 
at once literary and trained to action, in an 
unfortunate and impermanent art-form. It 
is much more readable than the Euphues 
books. Sidney, indeed, was infected with the 
mannerism of verbal and phrasal antithesis 
which in Lilly was a mania ; and he never 
in this book attains save momentarily to the 
balance of style which the sincerity of his 
purpose and his purport enabled him to 
compass in the Apology. But he does not 
progress constantly upon antithesis as upon 



PROSE FICTION 211 

wooden stilts, in the manner of Lilly : the 
sentence can take other forms and vary its 
cadence, especially when the reflection is 
worth it ; and often it has enough of artificial 
grace, and even of true feeling, to explain to 
us the warmth of its acceptance in its genera- 
tion. Sidney had, in fact, an element of the 
higher genius that the glittering Lilly lacked. 
They are akin chiefly in their supererogation 
of words, their overdrafts upon utterance in 
proportion to their matter, and their conse- 
quent infliction of a burden of unnatural 
loquacity upon their personages. Et in Ar- 
cadia ego, Lilly might have said ; though 
Sidney is the finer writer as well as the 
greater man of the two. 

It is no contradiction of the denial of 
fruitfulness in the case of Lilly to say that 
two other Elizabethan story-tellers, one of 
them still readable with pleasure, the other 
much read in his day, enrolled themselves 
under his banner. Thomas Lodge's Rosa- > 
lynde (1590) actually had for sub-title 
Ewphues* Golden Legacy . . . bequeathed to 
Philautus* Sons; and Robert Greene cer- 
tainly aped and parroted Lilly through a 
dozen prose tales. But Lodge in Rosalynde 
merely employed Lilly's mannerisms in a 
new kind of story-telling ; whereas in Greene 
there is no abiding element apart from the 
sombre interest of his tales of rascality from 
the underworld in which he dived so deeply. 



212 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

Even as to that, indeed, he is indebted to 
earher writers on similar topics. Lodge re- 
veals himself as the one of the three who 
could really conceive an interesting plot, 
with interesting characters, and keep the 
story and the personages going without get- 
ting bogged in rhetoric and irrelevance. In 
that age of versatilities, when so many men 
not only alternated freely between writing 
and action, but freely tried so many forms of . 

writing. Lodge stands out notably, having | 
figured as dramatist, narrative poet, briefless 
barrister, pamphleteer, story-teller, sonnet- 
eer, satirist, translator, and soldier-sailor 
before settling down as translator and phy- 
sician. As adaptable as Gascoigne, he had 
more mental force, and his tale of Bosalynde 
proves him to have had a better heart. His 
first attempt at fiction. The Delectable History 
of Forbonius and Prisceria (1584), is indeed 
an unimpressive performance, in which the 
slightest of plots is made a peg for a series 
of declamations and poems. The hero and 
heroine are thwarted in the immemorial way 
by the lady's stern father ; she being sent to 
be immured in his country castle, where the 
hero, of course, finds access to her in dis- 
guise. He there recites for her entertain- 
ment and the advancement of his own suit 
a mass of verse; till the father again super- 
venes with a furious veto, which is speedily 
withdrawn, and the pair live happy ever 



PROSE FICTION 213 

after, like any other " walking " lady and 
gentleman. 

Rosalynde is a much more original and a 
much more interesting tale. It is indeed 
by a long way the best of his handful of 
tales, which mostly suggest mere imitation of 
models in Greene's gallery. Founded on the 
old ballad-tale of Gamelyn, driven to out- 
lawry by his bad brother, it develops the 
whole main-plot of As You Like It, Shake- 
speare having added only the humorous 
under-plot of Touchstone and Audrey, and 
the character of Jaques, with, of course, that 
whole blessed atmosphere of humour which 
no other romanticist of the day could create, 
though Lodge's fiction is not so destitute in 
that regard as that of Lilly and Sidney and 
Greene. 

The weakness of Rosalynde is just in the 
euphuistic machinery of mechanical anti- 
thesis in phrase, modish multiplication of 
simile, saw, and metaphor, and the constant 
substitution of harangue and apostrophe for 
true dialogue — all combining to create an 
effect of restless garrulity and thoughtless 
bustle. There is no sense of critical or 
artistic control, and sheer fear of being dull 
often brings out tedium. As regards the 
device of inserted poetry. Lodge succeeds 
rather better than Sidney, who so frequently 
drops into poetry in the Arcadia without 
making us sorry to go back to prose. Lodge's 



214 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

pieces in Rosalynde have a reasonable amount 
of connexion with the story; and though 
there are too many of them, the madrigal 
" Love in my bosom like a bee " would make 
a pleasant interruption anywhere. They all 
tell of that over-exuberance, that boundless 
loquacity, which marks most Elizabethan 
prose before Bacon, and most verse before the 
maturity of Shakespeare — a surplusage which 
seems part of the superabundance of vitality 
that wells up everywhere in the life of the 
epoch. Too often does the Elizabethan artist 
thus " die in his own too much," losing in- 
tensity in what the age called " copie." If 
Lodge had been less responsive to leads, less 
of a literary copyist, less eager to echo both 
Lilly and Greene, he might have left a deeper 
stamp upon Elizabethan literature. As it is, 
he remains one of its noticeable figures. 

The puzzling thing about his fiction is that 
he not only never repeats the success of 
Rosalynde but reverts to a far lower level. In 
1591 he produced an elaborate rewriting of 
the old quasi-biography of Robert Second, 
Duke of Normandy, otherwise Robert the 
Devil ; and thereafter, in 1596, a thing pro- 
fessedly taken from the Spanish, but possibly 
all his own, A Margarite of America, the 
most senseless literary construction of the 
period. The case of the wicked Robert 
appears to have suggested to him the idea of 
a story of another wicked prince ; but the 



PROSE FICTION 215 

grim old tale of sin and repentance had taught 
him nothing of the arts of verisimilitude. 
The novel sets out with an account of the 
stopping of an imminent battle between two 
emperors by an old gentleman of philosophic 
habit, who steps between the hosts to deliver 
an essay of two quarto pages in condemnation 
of war. After this idyllic start there comes 
a delirious succession of treacheries, crimes, 
tortures, and other atrocities, variegated by 
strokes of magic, and ending in a general 
funeral. The whole action is a mere night- 
mare. 

By Lodge's own picturesque account, this 
egregious narrative was penned by him, as 
was Rosalynde, on an adventurous voyage, in 
the Straits of Magellan, " in which place to 
the southward many wonderous Isles, many 
strange fishes, many monstrous Patagones, 
withdrew my senses " — circumstances which 
are partly explanatory. " The time I wrote 
in," he tells again, " was when I had rather 
will to get my dinner than to win my fame. 
The order I wrote in was past order, when I 
rather observed men's hands lest they should 
strike me, than curious reason of men to 
condemn me. In a word, I wrote under hope 
rather the fish should eat both me writing 
and my paper written, than fame should know 
me, hope should acquaint her with me, or 
any but misery should hear mine ending." 
The explanation, in brief, is that in 1592 he 



216 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

was " at sea with M. Candish (whose memory, 
if I repent not, I lament not)," and had a very- 
bad time of it. Writing his mad story by 
way of a distraction, he strung it with a 
series of poems and euphuistic dissertations, 
which partly did duty for epistles and dia- 
logue, a number of the amorous pieces being 
hardily presented as effusions by the wicked 
prince in praise of the last lady of his choice. 
The whole constitutes a singular vision of 
one side of Elizabethan life, setting up a 
hearty wish that the irrepressible belletrist 
had given us an account of his actual experi- 
ence under " M. Candish " instead of a tale 
in the manner of Euphues and the narrative 
taste of Bedlam. 

Greene, with his much larger output in 
fiction, did nothing so attractive as Rosa- 
lynde, but nothing so extravagant as this ; 
and in his series of part-narrative papers on 
" Cony-catching " and his Life and Death of 
Ned Browne, he attains to a measure of realism 
which Lodge never attempted. Yet Greene's 
Pandosto, otherwise Dorastus and Fawnia, 
upon which Shakespeare founded the Winters 
Tale, is finally repulsive in a way only possible 
to Greene, and not to be guessed from Shake- 
speare's transmutation. The bulk of Greene's 
prose fiction, in short, is no longer readable, 
popular as it was for a whole generation. His 
romantic tales, written in Lilly's style after 
bad Italian models, with a fluency thai out- 



PROSE FICTION 217 

goes even the Elizabethan standard, are 
strangely wanting in the note of reality 
which he was able several times to sound in 
his plays. This indeed is in keeping with 
the law already noted, in terms of which 
drama soon compels or invites an approach 
to verisimilitude that is not accepted by fiction 
till after generations of slipshod experiment. 
We are not entitled to say that if Shakespeare 
had written tales he would so far have trans- 
cended the lax technique of his day as to 
.produce something commensurate in power 
with his dramas. The narrative recitals of 
his characters are on the whole the least con- 
vincing parts of his plays : it is in the height 
of psychic action that he becomes the un- 
matched master. When Macbeth sees the 
ghost of Banquo he gasps a question which is 
the very quintessence of dramatic perception, 
setting our nerves tingling or shuddering with 
its impact : 

Which of you have done this ? 

When Iras sees at a flash the ruin of Cleo- 
patra's hopes, she puts in a line and a half the 
commentary which the novelists of the time 
would have beaten out into a page at least : 

Finish, good lady, the bright day is done. 
And we are for the dark. 

Though the older romancers, French and 
other, often attain in their naive way to ap- 



218 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

proximate effects of spontaneity, the Eliza- 
bethan noveHsts, Greene as Httle as any, had 
not a gUmpse of this electric power of simple 
and concentrated speech : they seem literally 
to have regarded their characters as puppets 
for whom they had to " patter " fluently in 
the fashion of the actual puppet show. The 
knavish Gascoigne alone, perhaps in virtue of 
recalling actual action, approaches to a 
plausible realism in the talk of his personages. 
Greene, setting to work on his stories before 
he had even tried his hand on a play, is as 
voluble and as external as well might be ; 
and he never gets abreast of his art. In his 
better plays he seems at times really to 
visualize a character ; and a line or two of 
Margaret at the fair in Friar Bacon and Friar 
Bungay : 

We country sluts of merry Fressingfield, 
Come to buy needless naughts to make us fine, 

can live in memory as something of life re- 
covered from oblivion. But the good women 
in his stories, though at times made thinkable 
in respect of their action, never strike this 
note in their talk. They remain moralizing 
or euphuizing rhetoricians, literally "talking 
like a book " — the book of Euphues — with 
a deadly verbosity, and wholly failing to 
materialize for us as real people. Curiously 
enough, the bad women, whom he almost 
never introduces in his plays, come nearer 



PROSE FICTION 219 

creating the artistic illusion. At bottom, it 
may be suspected, lies the economic bane, 
the need to produce rapidly a considerable 
mass of manuscript, paid for at a low rate. 
Hence hasty narrative, and an infinity of 
declamation in place of possible dialogue. 

It is to Nashe in fiction, as in humorous 
prose, that we must turn for our best taste of 
the time. The Unfortunate Traveller (1593) 
may have been motived by the Spanish 
picaresque romance Lazarillo de Tormes, trans- 
lated in 1576 ; but it is developed in a 
quite independent way, with a range of effect, 
tragic and comic, which the Spanish master- 
piece does not cover. It begins in a quite 
circumstantial fashion with the picaresque 
reminiscences of the page Jack Wilton, at 
the siege of Tournay and Terouanne in the 
reign of Henry VIII. Thence Jack returns 
to England, to be driven forth again by the 
sweating sickness ; and the scene changes to 
Munster, where we witness the destruction 
of the Anabaptists led by John of Leiden. 
Famous men come into the narrative ; first, 
the poet Earl of Surrey, then Erasmus and 
Thomas More, concerning whom Nashe says 
but little, checking here his abundant vein of 
invention and commentary, and contenting 
himself with citing their known opinions. 
With less eminent personages his wit plays 
freely : and the description of a disputation 
of orators at Wittemberg is one of the hap- 



V 



220 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

piest of his extravaganzas. Surrey, in whose 
service Jack Wilton enters, is duly carried 
to Italy, where he never was, legend here 
supplying Nashe with matter. 

From this point adventurous incident 
multiplies, very much in the fashion later 
associated with Defoe, but with less than his 
regard for decorum. Jack Wilton's tale is 
in fact the first effective autobiographical 
romance in English, and at the same time the 
first realistic tale of modern life, apart from 
Greene's accounts of the ways of criminals. 
Written in the incomparably racy English of 
which Nashe was the sole master, with all 
his wealth of vivid comment, it constitutes a 
new departure in Tudor literature. And yet, 
strange to say, it had no such vogue as was 
won by many of the euphuistic romances 
of Greene. Either Nashe's realism was too 
gross for the " Gentlemen Readers " — and it 
can be gross enough — or the very idea of 
realism in prose fiction was still too strange 
for the reading v/orld to welcome. We are 
to remember that neither biography nor 
autobiography could yet be said to exist in 
English, Fulke Greville's Lije of Sidney 
being left for the next age ; and, strange as 
the idea may seem to-day, the autobiographical 
form of Nashe's romance would itself, pro- 
bably, be an odd novelty. Yet he is tolerably 
conventional in the harangues which he puts 
in the mouths of villains and victims in some 



PROSE FICTION 221 

of his most desperate scenes. Here he dis- 
plays in some degree the common weakness 
of his art in his time, resorting to formal 
rhetoric for lack of due intensity of psychic 
force. It is as a humorist that he is most 
himself. But between the freshness and verve 
of his invention and description, and his wild 
variety of realistic incident, his performance 
is as remarkable as its failure to win vogue 
or set a fashion. On the side of fiction, once 
more, English taste was as yet merely nascent. 
A less gifted writer, who passed out of sight 
within a century, after having been much 
more popular than Nashe, is found to be 
much more obviously in the direct line of 
evolution. Thomas Deloney, weaver, pamph- 
leteer, and ballad-maker, struck out a species 
of simple story-telling which was greatly to 
the taste of immediate posterity, and has 
plain affinities with the more developed 
English novel of the eighteenth century. 
Probably descended from a French Hugue- 
not named Delaunay, he may have known 
French ; but his way of working is substan- 
tially English, as are his themes. The Plea- 
sant History of Jack of Newberie (1597) and 
The Pleasant History of Thomas of Reading 
(1599) proceed on English traditions and 
deal with English life, English places, Eng- 
lish names — a simple bid for popularity which 
had not suggested itself to Lilly, Sidney, 
Greene, or Lodge. The art, sooth to say, is 



222 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

crude enough. Jack of Newberie first pre- 
sents the beginnings of John Winchcomb, a 
celebrated weaver, who rose to be master of 
two hundred workers in Henry VIII's time ; 
telHng how his master's widow insisted on 
marrying him ; whereafter a standing comic 
story of a staid husband and an unruly wife is 
made to do biographical duty. Jack's second 
marriage, however, is treated with true local 
colour ; and his services with his company 
of armed journeymen at the battle of Flodden 
are made much of, with songs and ballads 
to diversify the entertainment. For lack of 
narrative matter, chapter fifth is constituted 
of a list " of the pictures which Jack of 
Newbery had in his house, whereby he en- 
couraged his servants to seek for fame and 
dignity," the said pictures being portraits of 
kings, emperors, and popes, plus one philo- 
sopher, who had all risen to greatness from 
lowly status ; and chapter sixth deals with 
the difficulties set up by legislative restraints 
on trade. Thereafter come episodes slenderly 
connected with the hero, rounding the book 
off into a medley of quasi-biography and 
romantic anecdote. 

Deloney's most ambitious composition is 
The Gentle Craft, in two parts (1597-8), " a 
Discourse containing many matters of Delight, 
very pleasant to be read : Shewing what 
famous men have been shoemakers in time 
past in this land, with their worthy deeds and 



PROSE FICTION 223 

great hospitality. Set forth with Pictures, 
and variety of Wit and Mirth. Declaring the 
cause why it is called the Gentle Craft, and 
also how the proverb first grew. A Shoe- 
maker's Son is a Prince born. T. D." The 
heroes and heroines of the first part of 
the medley are St. Hugh and Winifred ; the 
brothers Crispianus and Crispine, and Ursula ; 
and Simon Eyre of London ; and its popu- 
larity is attested by Dekker's adoption of 
the last tale as the basis of his Shoemaker's 
Holiday. But there is no artistic advance 
in Deloney's work, which indeed was packed 
within a space of some three years. His 
simple ambitions were confined to multiply- 
ing episodic interest ; and though his ordinary 
style has the merit of a simplicity disdained 
by the leading story- writers of the age, he did 
not scruple to borrow some of their euphuistic 
devices for purposes of embellishment. 

In sum, he is an attractive if undistin- 
guished figure, a man of the people, who knew 
their life, and might have deserved better of 
us if he had been content to tell of it more 
carefully. But he, like his more cultured 
congeners, was mainly concerned to make a 
living by his pen-work ; and the result is a 
miscellany of tales, ballads, and pamphlets 
which attest rather his cheerful industry 
than his inspiration. It is as an early appren- 
tice in what was one day to become a great 
art that he appeals to the student now. 



224 elizabethan literature 
Chapter x 

THE LATER DRAMATISTS 

For some of those who most keenly reahze 
the marvellousness of Shakespeare's power, 
there is a certain difficulty in grouping him 
with his corrivals. It seems a case of 
" Eclipse first and the rest nowhere." Genius 
seems to obliterate mere talent, as the sun's 
light the stars. But in all such impressions, 
which belong specifically to the psychosis of 
youth, there is something of hallucination, 
even if " whom genius deludes is well de- 
luded." Much of the intensity of the im- 
pression made by Shakespeare is due to the 
unmatchable charm of his verse-rhythm ; 
though his Falstaff-scenes sufficiently remind 
us that his amazing power of seizing character 
is something over and above his poetry. 
But Marlowe of the mighty line is in his 
elemental way a master too ; and Ben Jon- 
son, who had a gift for prose proper that 
Shakespeare lacked, is a memorable dramatic 
figure. The inferiority of these powerful 
workers may be summed up in saying that in 
them the elements of greatness are much less 
happily mixed. 

Jonson, like Marlowe, comes forward in 
revolt against other men's dramatic methods ; 
but his revolt is in the spirit of prose, whereas 
Marlowe's was in the spirit of one vein of 
poetry. The musical charm of Shakespeare's 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 225 

comedies, with their plots from romance and 
wonderland, seems to have been alien to 
Jonson's critical bent ; though in his masques 
and other later works he partly harks back 
to it. The pursuit of sensuous beauty of 
sound by Spenser, at the cost of verbiage, left 
him equally cold. Himself " rammed with 
life," he demanded a drama that should por- 
tray the " humours " or idiosyncrasies of the 
life around him ; oddly limiting his plea, 
however, to the case of comedy. In tragedy 
he cleaved to the ant 'que, producing his 
Sejanus (1603), and Catiline (1609) with an 
immensity of labour and documentary learn- 
ing of which no previous playwright had 
dreamt. But it was to comedy that he gave 
most of his creative effort ; and it was in this 
that he made his mark, in so far as he found 
theatrical success at all. In the Prologue 
to Every Man in his Humour he scoffs, as 
Sidney had done, at the plays in which a 
personage grows from an infant to an old 
man ; and no less at the chronicle plays, with 
their properties of " some few foot-and-half- 
foot-swords," their chorus which " wafts you 
o'er the seas," their mechanism of lowered 
thrones ; and their squibs, stage-thunder, 
and drum-storms. He will give, not these. 

But deeds, and language such as men do use, 
And persons such as comedy would choose 
When she would show an image of the times. 
And sport with human follies, not with crimes, 

15 



226 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

To this claim he does not strictly live up : 
his Volpone will not square with his doctrine. 
But in Every Man in his Humour he sought 
to fulfil it, making the action turn solely on 
the play of tics of character and tricks of 
action in a day of London life, without a 
touch of romance or poetry. It is all as 
original and as powerful in its own way as 
Marlowe's tragedy ; and he who would seek 
the local colour of Cockney hfe in that day 
should peruse the piece, with the later 
Bartholomew's Fair, and the trilogy of West- 
ward Ho, Eastward Ho, and Northward Ho, 
in the second of which Jonson collaborated 
with Chapman and Marston ; the others being 
by Dekker and Webster. 

But Jonson' s comedy is joyless, and his 
serried tragedy cold. They are alike travails 
of understanding rather than of art ; labours 
of the faculty of moral criticism, not births of 
artistic genius. The labour is so strenuous 
and the critical faculty so vigorous that they 
compel critical interest ; but we are con- 
scious always of an appeal rather to a jury 
collected to censure manners and indict follies 
and crimes than to our spontaneous sense of 
truth to life, and our interest in a sequence of 
events. Even in his realistic comedy he 
clings to the unrealistic expedient of the 
soliloquy ; and he is capable of making a 
soliloquist express a fear that he may have 
been overheard — a crudity of art from which 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 227 

the mature Shakespeare would have recoiled. 
The characters, too, always tend to be mere 
characteristics personified ; the satire and 
the censure overlay the action, alike in 
tragedy and in comedy ; and the fun is 
strident in the lightest scenes. To use an 
overworn but convenient term, Jonson is not 
sympathetic. He rarely, in Walton's phrase, 
" handles his frog as if he loved him." There 
is more of pure laughter in one Falstaff scene 
than in all Ben's plays ; for " humour " in 
his hands seldom rises from its primary to 
its modern sense ; and in the plays in which 
he thrashes his hostile rivals, Marston and 
Dekker, we hear rather the stertorous snort of 
defiance than the chuckle of the true humorist. 
One of the likeliest of the guesses which 
identify personalities in some of the plays of 
the period is that which finds in Alexander's 
description of Ajax in Troilus and Cressida 
Shakespeare's riposte for some of Jonson's 
jovial jeers at him or his comrades. In The 
Return from Parnassus {circa 1601), one of a 
set of university plays in which actors and 
poets are satirized and criticized, one of the 
lampooned players tells how 

Few of the university pen plays well. . . . Why here'a 
our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down — ay, 
and Ben Jonson too. O ! that Ben Jonson is a pesti- 
lent fellow ; he brought up Horace, giving the poets 
a pill ; but oiu* fellow Shakespeare hath given him 
a purge, that made him bewray his credit. 



228 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

If the " purge " is still extant, it may well 
consist of the passage in question : 

This man, lady, hath robbed many beasts of their 
particular additions ; he is valiant as the lion, chur- 
lish as the bear, slow as the elephant ; a man in 
whom nature hath so crowded humours, that his 
valour is crushed into folly, his folly sauced with 
discretion ; there is no man hath a virtue that he 
hath not a glimpse of ; nor any man an attaint, but 
he carries some stain of it : he is melancholy without 
cause, and merry against the hair : He hath the 
joints of everything, but everything so out of joint 
that he is a gouty Briareus, many hands and no use ; 
or purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight. 

As a genially satirical account of Jonson, 
this comes terribly near the mark ; and it 
constitutes a far keener thrust than the 
virulent caricature by Dekker in Satiro- 
mastix, where Jonson is presented as a bully 
and coward on the lines of his own Bobadill. 
There is no such venom in the Ajax portrait : 
Shakespeare had none ; and Jonson's ostensible 
reply in the dialogue appended to The Poet- 
aster : 

Only amongst them I am sorry for 
Some better natures by the rest so drawn 
To run in that vile line, 

is worthy enough, though he certainly had 
been the aggressor. Thirteen years later, in 
Bartholomew Fair, he gibes anew at the " ser- 
vant-master " in the Tempest For him, 
Caliban was neither comedy nor tragedy. 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 229 

But it is a complete error to suppose that 
Jonson was personally hostile to Shake- 
speare. His lines on the Poet-Ape, often 
quoted as evidence of such enmity, were 
launched at another mark : Dekker and 
Marston in the Satiromastix show that they 
both took the epithet to themselves ; and it 
could be no false friend who penned the 
superb eulogy of the dead Shakespeare in the 
lines prefixed to the folio of the plays in 1623. 
Jonson of all men in that day w as least likely 
to fail to see the supreme beauty of the great 
lines in the Tempest, however he might gird 
at the machinery or the characters of wonder- 
land ; and there is much reason to think that 
the friends, however each might banter the 
other on his differing bias, learned some- 
thing from each other all along. There is 
great probability in the legend that Shake- 
speare secured the acceptance by his com- 
pany of Every Man in his Humour : he was 
the man to see at once its new power in its 
own kind, and to admit that his own romantic 
comedy was not the last word in the lighter 
drama. After Jonson' s new departure he 
significantly turns to tragedy ; and between 
his comedy period and Hamlet he is seen to 
have reached a new power of blank verse. 
This, in turn, appears to be quickly reflected 
in Sejanus (1603), where Jonson shows a power 
to produce newly varied verse-rhythm above 
which he never afterwards rose. Even in his 



230 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

later comedy, as in his masques, Ben betrays 
a craving after that charm of poetry in action 
which in Shakespeare was primordial ; and 
which to-day dehghts men and women as 
it did in his own time. Perhaps Ben sus- 
pected that the pursuit of reahsm on his Unes 
had, after all, not led him any nearer reality 
than Twelfth Night and As You Like It, 
where no contemporary is lampooned, where 
the sun shines on the just and the unjust, 
and where real human nature runs joyously 
through plots framed to charm away care. 
On his Poetaster and Cynthia's Bevels, with 
their tedious and obscure controversy, and 
their long-drawn censorious plan, he could 
hardly look back with pleasure. 

Avowedly he had piqued himself upon 
" invention," refusing to avail himself, as did 
Shakespeare, of the mass of plots given to 
the playwright's hand in the Palace of Plea- 
sure and other collections of Italian and 
French tales. Yet in the first draught of 
Every Man in his Humour he had given his 
characters Italian names in the usual way ; 
and in point of fact he could not help copying 
the character-types of previous drama. His 
Bohadill is a variant of the Basilisco of Kyd's 
Soliman andPerseda ; who, in turn, is modelled 
after the Captain Crackstone of the old Two 
Italian Gentlemen ; who follows Italian types 
that go back to Plautus. It needed a more 
plastic and sympathetic faculty than Jon- 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 231 

son's to reflect from the medley of actual life 
at once convincing personalities and con- 
nected actions of a commanding interest. 

Yet in the way of hard exaggerative 
photography it would be difficult to exceed 
the sardonic force of such plays as The 
Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair; the first 
so perfect in structure, the second so over- 
whelming in its pell-mell of riotous, clamor- 
ous, vulgar life. And the other realistic 
plays of Jonson are only less remarkable 
for their laboured power. It is not life 
that we see in Volpone or in The New Inn : 
it is the massive effort of a determined 
censor of life to shape alternately a mina- 
tory and an attractive action, in one 
making life unnaturally odious, in another 
unnaturally charming. But if we were to 
measure the work solely by Ruskin's test of 
the " amount of mind to the square inch," 
we should have to place it high indeed. 
One secret of all great art is the absorption of 
the artist in his subject, and we can see 
Jonson grappled to his. His explosive de- 
fiance of such playwrights as Dekker and 
Marston came of his contemptuous sense of 
their relative levity of artistic temper, as well 
as of his wrath at their contemptuous retorts 
upon his own confident pretension to have 
the only right method ; and in that contempt 
he never included Shakespeare, however he 
might deride romanticism as such. He knew 



232 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

that no play of theirs was ever thought and 
wrought out as was the sHghtest of Shake- 
speare's. But he was slow to see that their 
irregular faculty was from time to time lit 
up by gleams of genius of a kind he did not 
possess. Perhaps a recognition of it underlay 
his reconciliation with Marston. In the case 
of Chapman his recognition had been prompt : 
the sclaolarship as well as the power and in- 
tensity of that kindred fighter was bound to 
win him. 

Marston, Dekker, Heywood, Chapman, and 
Middleton all belong in their beginnings to 
Elizabeth's reign, and with Shakespeare and 
Jonson they form an unparalleled group. 
Dekker may have begun playwriting about 
1594 or earlier ; Chapman about 1596 ; Mar- 
ston and Heywood not till 1599 ; Middleton 
not till 1602. Of the five, Dekker had on 
the whole the happiest dramatic' gifts,. and 
the least happy life ; and though Jonson in 
cold blood called him a rogue, and even harder 
things have been said of him later, it is 
dijBficult to dislike him. In Lamb's view, he 
had " poetry enough for anything " ; and to 
read Old Fortunatus is to come near assenting. 
His Shoemakers Holiday (1599) shows the 
influence of Greene ; but it has a hearty and 
cheerful comedy strain which was approached 
by Greene only in George-a-Greene ; and 
which differentiates no less from the harder 
brilliance of Jonson. As a kindly picture of 



THE LATER DRAIMATISTS 233 

old London trade life, touched with romanti- 
cism, it makes an appeal which the "Ho!" 
group of bustling Cockney comedies never 
do ; the reason being that realism must be 
very well done indeed to attain artistic unity, 
while a romantic plot has a unifying force 
not so hard to attain. 

No such interest attaches to the comedy 
of Patient Grissel (1599), in which Dekker 
collaborated with Chettle. That impossible 
heroine is here as incredible as in any other 
presentment of her, while the husband is 
gratuitously detestable ; and the minor char- 
acters are unoriginal and unreal. Much more 
attractive is Old Fortunatus, a play telling 
of the example not only of Greene but of 
Marlowe, whose early verse is so often echoed 
that it is not possible confidently to reject 
the opinion that the First Part was written 
as early as 1590. In any case it belongs 
definitely to the pre-Jonsonian and romantic 
drama, in which some transcriptions from 
contemporary life are placed in a plot " out 
of space, out of time " ; realism relieving 
fairy-tale, and prose relieving poetry. It 
cannot be said to attain greatness ; but it has 
energy and originality enough to make us 
look for great work at its author's hands. 

Only in a slight degree is the hope fulfilled. 
In The Honest Whore and The Witch of Edmon- 
ton, both written in collaboration, Dekker's 
original gift of kindly sympathy plays to 



234 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

good purpose, though in the former the spirit 
of realism is burdened on the one hand by 
resort to the favourite EHzabethan form of 
extravaganza — madhouse scenes — and on the 
other by compHcation of plot. The artistic 
merit of the first play, in both parts, inheres 
in the title-character, who turns honest 
woman as the wife of the caitiff who had first 
wronged her and continues to wrong her as 
her husband. For the impossible conception 
of Grissel there is here substituted a possible 
one ; and the self-reclaimed sinner is a hun- 
dred times more lifelike than the all-enduring 
saint. No less convincing is the study of her 
father, sound all through as she was at heart, 
and therefore capable of heartily forgiving, 
when she has redeemed herself, the daughter 
who had shamed him. In such work as this, 
as in the better plays of Thomas Heywood, 
we have the clearest anticipation of the Vic- 
torian novel, wherein the reactions of character 
become the motive and basis of the perform- 
ance, unhampered by the excrescences result- 
ing from the supposed necessities of the 
Elizabethan theatre. Collaboration in Dek- 
ker's case meant a combination of plot 
motives, with a resulting loss of homogeneity ; 
but it would seem to be to his realistic talent 
that we owe the strong character- work of the 
play ; though the instability of critical taste 
which, no less than insecurity of genius, puts 
all the dramatists of the age upon a lower 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 285 

plane than Shakespeare, was only too fully 
shared by Dekker. 

It is on the general ground of his gift of 
sympathy, together with cues of style, that 
we are led to assign to him the most remark- 
able feature of The Witch of Edmonton^ 
the partly sympathetic presentment of the 
title-character there. Only in Shakespeare's 
handling of Shylock do we have any such 
dramatic refinement upon popular prejudice 
as is here achieved in dealing with a figure 
much more familiar in England than the 
usurious Jew. That such a theme for real 
everyday tragedy was never taken up by the 
great master, is one of the grounds for regret 
as to the special directions given to his; 
genius. In Macbeth the witches, perhaps 
copied from another play, are essentially 
supernatural and merely evil figures, as they 
had need be in a play that was to please the 
witch-fearing James I. It was left to Dekker; 
to remind us — without venturing on a wholljr 
sympathetic picture — how horribly the popu- 
lar superstition wrought to create the monster 
of its imagination, breeding evil where it 
feared evil, and making a persecuted victim 
of its fancied persecutor. 

But of this notable faculty there is no^ 
further notable fruit. Whether because of 
lack of gift on the part of the authors or the 
actors, or by reason of immaturity of taste* 
among the public^ realistic tragedy never 



236 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

went far in either Elizabethan or Jacobean 
England. The predominant types were fin- 
ally romantic tragedy and realistic comedy, 
with at times a tragical turn. Arden of 
Feversham and the Warning for Fair Women 
remain the only good plays of the kind : that 
entitled Two Tragedies in One, signed " Robert 
Yarrington," but probably the work of 
Chettle, Day, and Houghton, is clumsy work 
in comparison. The Yorkshire Tragedy, pub- 
lished as Shakespeare's in 1608, but certainly 
not from his hand as it stands, appears to be 
the work of George Wilkins, to whom is to 
be credited the inferior part of Pericles, so 
obviously divisible from the rest. It is con- 
ceivable that Wilkins may in The Yorkshire 
Tragedy have reduced to his own raw prose 
the higher prose or verse of the poet with 
whom in some fashion he took leave or was 
permitted to collaborate ; but the problem 
remains a very obscure one ; and we can but 
say that the theme, the downward course of 
a headstrong and passionate gambler, who 
ruins himself and murders his family, might 
have been made by Shakespeare a master- 
piece of pity and terror. 

Dekker, always living from hand to mouth, 
like most of his tribe, deteriorated in nearly 
every respect, and the bulk of his preserved 
work is not worth preserving. His life in 
large part anticipated the later sketch of 
the career of the hack — " toil, envy, want, the 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 237 

patron and the jail " — with very little of the 
patron, and a great deal of the jail. Thomas 
Heywood, the most fecund of all English 
dramatists, who appears to have lived to a 
ripe age in comparative prosperity, is not on 
the whole artistically luckier. To the Eliza- 
bethan time he belongs in respect of his 
Four Prentices of London — juvenile work on a 
juvenile theme ; his two Edward IV plays, 
in which he handles the story of Jane Shore 
with a good deal of elaborated pathos, if not 
with tragic force ; and his masterpiece, A 
Woman Killed with Kindness, which was 
played in 1603. His tragically ending serious 
play matches well with Dekker's Honest 
Whore, though its central character has not 
the " observed " stamp of Dekker's best work. 
Like that, it suggests the germ of the Vic- 
torian novel, though it hints rather of East 
Lynne than of Thackeray or of George Eliot ; 
and the lapse of its erring woman is the col- 
lapse of sheer weakness rather than the 
aberration of passionate will which makes 
the ground of the higher tragedy. Long 
afterwards, in The English Traveller, Hey- 
wood handled a variant of the same theme ; 
and there, though the characterization is 
stronger, the presentment is psychologically 
unconvincing. Heywood's talent, in fine, was 
rather for pathos than for tragedy, and, in 
comedy, rather for good-humour than for 
humour. Some real light he does throw on 



288 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

English life, albeit with uncertain hand. 
The wonder is that, producing the mass of 
playwriting he did, he so often attains a good 
level of efficiency. We have his own assur- 
ance, which there is no reason to doubt, that 
up to 1633 he had put his hand or " a main 
finger " to a hundred and twenty plays : a 
testimony which conveys anew the open 
secret of the economic determination, as to 
quantity and quality, of the bulk of the old 
drama. Heywood's output meant four plays 
a year, written or collaborated in, besides a 
number of poems and prose treatises. More 
prudence, and perhaps a little more industry 
than belonged to Dekker, enabled him to keep 
his head above water where the other so often 
went under. But not thus was greatness to 
be attained in drama. It was in respect of 
his income from his partnership in his theatre- 
company that Shakespeare was enabled to 
put out his full power in the latter half of his 
twenty or more years of playmaking. As a 
mere dramatist, he could not have lived by 
his writing. 

It was presumably economic compulsion 
that drove George Chapman to playwriting, 
for which he was imperfectly gifted. His first 
signed play, The Blind Beggar of Alexandria 
(1598), has no psychic or poetic merit, though 
it shows a certain fertility in devices of plot. 
Echoing Marlowe, Greene, and Peele, he had 
not yet found any fit path for himself in 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 239 

drama, though he was about forty years old ; 
and not till he had done several realistic 
comedies, and collaborated with Jonson and 
Marston in Eastward Ho, in which an attack 
upon the Scots served to bring all three to 
prison, did he turn his hand to the form of 
tragedy in which he was able to make an 
original mark. That he did so while carrying 
on his great task of translating Homer is one 
of the proofs of his power, though he never 
produced a satisfying masterpiece. Far in- 
ferior to Shakespeare, inferior even to Jonson, 
in the power of " seeing life steadily and see- 
ing it whole " ; inferior even to lesser men in 
the power to round and balance a play, he 
had in him the tragic spirit; and he created 
truly tragic characters, compact of passion, 
however unduly given to complicated de- 
clamation. We cannot say of his tragedy, 
as of Jonson's, that it is cold. Yet on this 
path he falls behind Jonson in point of san- 
ity and self-command. Bussy d^Ambols, in 
several respects his greatest work, is sadly 
flawed by an absurd use of the device of the 
ghost ; and he always lacks variety of 
characterization, though he often attains in- 
tensity. None of his comedy characters lives 
for us as several of Jonson's do, to say no- 
thing of the comedy of Beaumont and 
Fletcher. Poet as he essentially was, he 
cannot touch with poetry his women in 
comedy, hardly even in tragedy ; and in 



240 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

both orders alike he seems never to see his 
wood for the trees. With a great faculty for 
passionate but turgid rhetoric, he lacks that 
power of the arresting, life-like phrase which 
in Webster at times recalls Shakespeare ; and 
as an artist he remains for us what he shows 
himself to be in his first poems and his ex- 
plosive prefaces, something volcanic, tumul- 
tuous, ill-coordinated: in Shakespeare's phrase, 
a " fierce thing replete with too much rage, 
whose strength's abundance weakens his 
own heart." Shakespeare, we feel, though 
we have not a tolerable portrait of him, had 
serene eyes ; those of Jonson, in the authen- 
tic portrait, have an unexpected, luminous 
quality of reverie and self-possession ; those 
of Chapman, in his, have the very rictus of 
angry self-assertion and self-will. Such a 
one could not hold the mirror up to nature, 
either dramatically or ratiocinatively, though 
he could flash lightning upon her at times. 
He is at his best, and is best to be remembered, 
in fine flights of moral poetry, as in the speech 
of King Henry in Byron's Tragedy (iv. 1) : 

O thou that govem'st the keen sword of kings. 

Direct my arm in this important stroke. 

Or hold it being advanc'd ; the weight of blood. 

Even in the basest subject, doth exact 

Deep consultation in the highest king ; 

For in one subject, death's unjust affrights, 

Passions and pains, though he be ne'er so poor. 

Ask more remorse than the voluptuous spleens 

Of all kings in the world deserve respect ; 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 241 

He should be bom grey-headed that will bear 
The sword of empire. 

No other dramatist within the Elizabethan 
limit, after Jonson, can be put wholly upon 
as high a plane. John Marston, who set out 
as a slashing satirist and an erotic poet, main- 
tains in his plays some of the offensive qualities 
of style which repel in his early verse, making 
his characters talk with his own thrasonical 
violence. He cares nothing for the economies 
of drama, the technique of exposition and 
gradation ; and his sudden rush of action is 
apt to be as hard to understand as a street 
fight. To this day, indeed, we cannot be 
sure as to his part in The Malcontent (1600 ?), 
twice published by the same bookseller in 
1604, in the first edition as the work of 
Marston, in the second as by John Webster, 
with additions by Marston. We can but say 
that in this play, as in the earlier Antonio 
and Mellida and Antonio^s Revenge, there are 
passages of harmonious verse of a brooding, 
pregnant power which seem to be the result 
of Marston's appreciative listening to Shake- 
speare, and were apparently not within the 
capacity of Webster, whose tragic gift was 
not seconded by any genius for the handling 
of his verse instrument. 

Webster and the other principal dramatists 
who carried on the work of the theatres — 
Rowley, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and 
Philip Massinger — ^are wholly outside our 

16 



242 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

period ; and cannot be here surveyed in any 
detail, though an established convention 
makes the label of Elizabethan drama stretch 
down to the reign of Charles, and cover the 
work of James Shirley, who made plays from 
1625 till the closing of the theatres under 
the Commonwealth. Taking the post-Eliza- 
bethan drama as a whole down to that 
terminus, we can hardly refuse assent to the 
general verdict that it is marked by the pro- 
fusion of decay ; though we must not let the 
metaphor carry for us the implication that 
an art-form is as it were originally doomed to 
degeneration and death, like a plant or an 
animal. Given arts advance and decline in 
different periods and countries in terms of 
the total conditions, among which the exis- 
tence of genius is not to be posited as 
conveying the whole explanation. Original 
genius, for one thing, after a time recoils from 
an art-form that has become conventional. 
Genius, for another thing, may exist poten- 
tially without being evoked ; and in the 
evocation there is always the element of un- 
traced causation, which we call " chance." 

Perhaps the sociology of the matter may 
be reasonably indicated thus. The dramatic 
efflorescence of the last fifteen or twenty years 
of Elizabeth's reign was one of the results of 
a rapid fertilization of the English intelligence 
by a variety of forms of foreign culture, under 
fostering social and economic conditions. 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 243 

which brought together a handful of play- 
wrights of varying degrees of genius, one of 
them supremely gifted. To his topmost 
height, no one else ever attained. In the 
next age, new culture of the required kind 
did not pour in as before. There are many 
testimonies to the effect that in the eyes of 
foreign scholars the English intellect under 
James turned to reactionary theology. But 
that absorption and the concomitant political 
tension meant, among other things, the turn- 
ing of vigorous minds in an increasing degree 
away from belles lettres and towards problems 
of creed and action. Above all, the constant 
record of the playwriting career was one of 
hardship, of toil which brought no monetary 
competence, of irksome dependence on pri- 
vate bounty. Jonson had relatively high 
earning power in various kinds ; but like 
all the dramatists who had no partnership in 
the theatres, he was chronically short of 
funds, and had to solicit gifts. Massinger was 
only less impecunious than Dekker. This 
tale of hardship was not likely to attract 
judicious men ; and the purely artistic 
temperament is no guarantee for good sense. ! 
Beaumont and Fletcher, indeed, were both 
" well-born," the first being the son of a 
judge, the second the son of a bishop ; and 
they presumably did not feel the pressure of 
want ; but they both died young, Beaumont 
in 1^116, Fletcher m 162-^ After that date,, 



244 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

serious people were increasingly indifferent 
or hostile to the theatre ; and plays were 
written for less critical and thoughtful audi- 
ences. Thus the standard of taste declined 
with the decline in the quality of the recruits 
to the profession of playmaking. 

It is a mistake to say, as some do, that the 
later playwrights were necessarily driven to 
violent and unnatural or corrupt effects by a 
sheer exhaustion of good themes. It is true 
that the post-Elizabethan drama runs notice- 
ably to sexual grossness. Some of the 
situations in Heywood's Golden Age and in 
Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess {circa 1609), 
outgo in immodesty anything in the older 
drama, apart from Titus Andronicus ; and 
Fletcher in particular is chronically prurient. 
In the Shepherdess we have a strangely hypo- 
critical masquerade of corruptness playing 
at purity, an abundance of dainty poetry 
punctuated with gross action, and a winding 
up of a coarse and silly plot with a series of 
moral allocutions from the mouths of the 
Priest of Pan and a satyr. It is a far cry 
from the Midsummer Nighfs Dream to this 
indecent "morality play," which partly paro- 
dies it. Its failure might seem to vindicate 
the taste of the audiences ; but Fletcher's 
later work tells rather of a lowering of their 
standards, as if the decent people had at length 
stayed away. But the other symptoms cited 
as degenerate were nothing new. Violent and 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 245 

unnatural effects were abundantly sought for 
by dramatists of the "first flight." Tambur- 
laine presents them ; the Spanish Tragedy, 
Selimus, Locrine, Tancred and Gismunda, and 
David and Bethsabe, rival any later play in 
sheer savagery and hideous action ; Titus 
Andronicus, which is not Shakespeare's, is 
an accumulation of sickening atrocities ; and 
Alphonsus Emperor of Germany, heedlessly 
ascribed to Chapman, but really an early 
play, probably by Greene or Kyd and Peele, 
runs it hard. Ford and Cyril Tourneur, 
author of The Atheist's Tragedy and The 
Revenger's Tragedy in the next generation, 
were men of neurotic proclivity, but they 
were not made so by dearth of good tragic 
plot material. Had Shakespeare taken up 
the theme of Webster's Duchess of Malfi he 
would have made a play no less tragic, yet 
without conveying the sense of supereroga- 
tion in horror that is set up by Webster's 
tragedy. Webster was in truth a dramatist 
with a very keen sense of the wild play of evil 
in life ; but he would have been so if he had 
written twenty years earlier. Massinger took 
an extremely repulsive subject in The Un- 
natural Combat ; and Chapman dabbled much 
in violence ; but in The Admiral of France he 
found a theme in no sense odious. 

In some respects there was actual develop- 
ment in dramatic technique and capacity 
among the new men in Shakespeare's closing 



246 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

years, and later. The author of Othello and 
Lear would doubtless have acknowledged 
new forms of power in Webster ; and the 
complicated plots of the Winter^s Tale and 
Cymbeline seem to show that he took note of 
the new developments of plot interest in the 
work of Beaumont and Fletcher, and even of 
Dekker. It is not to be denied, again, that 
a number of the young men and women of 
Beaumont and Fletcher's comedies tell of a 
new and felicitous power of portraying con- 
temporary types. In those comedies, as in 
Porter's Two Angry Women of Ahington 
(1598), we catch more glimpses of everyday 
English people in their actual environment 
than Shakespeare has vouchsafed us. Comedy, 
as we saw, steadily headed towards realism 
and native life from Jonson onwards. But 
in tragedy there was no equivalent advance : 
Fletcher and Massinger alike sought their 
tragic plots in remote history or imaginary 
communities ; and for lack of moral sanity 
and true poetic imagination they there fell 
below the level of their achievement in 
comedy, to say nothing of the mighty tragedy 
of Shakespeare. 

Above all there was retrogression rather 
than advance in the great art of blank verse. 
Marston and Dekker caught something of the 
rhythmic secrets of Shakespeare ; and Beau- 
niont seems to have recognized that his was 
the ideal touch ; but where Fletcher works 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 247 

alone he soon falls away ; and Massinger, who 
was less of a lyrist, does still worse. Dramatic 
blank verse, herein failing to assimilate the 
technique of Surrey, had begun with a 
mechanical "end-stopped " line, usually clos- 
ing dutifully on a monosyllable ; from which 
monotony, before Shakespeare, it began to 
find some relief in a dissyllabic close; still, 
however, without running on the clause. 
Soon Shakespeare assimilated the double- 
ending, and soon he followed up that with 
the run-on line, in which the clause did not 
coincide with the rhythmic bar-measurement. 
Thus, duly balancing double with single end- 
ings, he brought blank verse to the perfection 
of fluidity and ever varying pulsation. Jon- 
son, though partly ready to see the value of 
the varying pause, for lack of delicacy of ear 
lapsed into new monotonies by framing long 
series of lines ending in dissyllables ; and 
Chapman, Fletcher, and Massinger all fell into 
the same snare. In Bussy d'Ambois, for in- 
stance (v, 2), we have one run of eight such 
endings, and in Every Man in his Humour 
(i, 1) a sequence of seven ; a monotony of 
effect which only a proportionately energetic 
variation of pause could cure. But while 
those poets do frequently vary their pauses, 
they seem to have no perception of their 
monotonies of line-ending, and are thus in- 
calculably disadvantaged with all readers 
sensitive to rhythm. It would seem that for 



248 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

purposes of the stage, where blank verse is 
so seldom well delivered, the monotony did 
not count ; but the lower standard of tech- 
nique can be seen among the less strenuous 
men to react on the whole work of composi- 
tion. 

Fletcher's case at first sight seems to be 
that of a man sinning against light ; for if 
the blank verse in the first scene of The 
Faithful Shepherdess, signed by him, be his, 
he began well. But in terms of the general 
critical agreement that in the joint plays his 
work is to be distinguished by the monotonous 
double endings, we are led to suspect that the 
small quantity of blank verse in that early 
piece is Beaumont's, and that Fletcher signed 
it on the strength of having written the 
rhymed verse which constitutes nine-tenths 
of the whole. It would seem, in short, that 
with all his gracfe in rhyme and song he lacked 
the special faculty required for the right 
management of the more difficult technique. 
The fact that, as the preface to the Shep- 
herdess shows, he could write a more finely 
modulated prose than any produced by 
Shakespeare, is quite in keeping with that 
inference. In any case, he is a " decadent " 
in blank verse. 

To this falling away in sheer workmanship 
the playgoing public seems to have been 
insensitive; and the practitioners themselves 
were quite complacent. Shirley, writing a 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 249 

prefatory address in the folio edition of 
Beaumont and Fletcher in 1647, speaks of 
them as the supreme dramatists, and of their 
work as " the greatest monument of the scene 
that time and humanity have produced." 
Shirley was simply an inferior workman, who, 
himself ncapable of good verse or good 
drama, could not see the vices of Fletcher's. 
The strong men were otherwise occupied. 
Milton, who in the darkened evening of his 
days was to show anew what blank verse in 
a great artist's hand could be, might have 
told his countrymen the truth ; but Milton, 
in his youth the enraptured votary of 
Shakespeare, whose art he best of all men 
could appraise, was now up to the neck in 
the political and ecclesiastical warfare which 
put a space of desolation between the old 
drama and all later literature. 

Taking that drama in the mass, we find it 
to consist, perforce, very largely of unleisurely, 
hand-to-mouth work ; even the greatest master 
being saddled with a good deal of poor stuff, 
some of it not even retouched by him ; while 
the ablest of his rivals and successors are to 
be enjoyed only in selections of their more 
fortunate pieces. But still the old drama 
remains the most remarkable mass of literary 
production in modern history down to the 
nineteenth century. Its sheer mass is aston- 
ishing, especially when we realize that there 
was far more of unpublished than of pub- 



250 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

lished work. The total list of plays of which 
we have copies or documentary mention runs 
towards two thousand ; and even if we count 
the lost plays as mostly worse than the saved, 
they still stand collectively, with the others, 
for a signal effort of constructive imagina- 
tion. And their particular form was never 
recovered after it was worked out in the 
period before the Civil War : the blank- 
verse drama of the Restoration and the 
eighteenth century never attains even to a 
second place as compared with the earlier 
mass ; and the poetic drama of the nine- 
teenth and twentieth centuries remains but 
an academic imitation. Not till the great 
development of the novel in the nineteenth 
century do we find an equivalent imaginative 
effort to that made in the preserved drama 
of Shakespeare's age, or a similar energy in 
the artistic reproduction of life. That is to 
say, the old drama is in respect of its time 
the more remarkable evolution of the two. 
In its typical form, it grew to a dazzling 
maturity of power within some twenty years, 
at the close of a century in which at the 
outset the national literature was but getting 
its " fore-parts " out of the soil of the Middle 
Ages. The culture which acted as the nutri- 
ment of the later growth is insignificant in 
comparison with that which went to the 
nourishment of nineteenth-century fiction in 
England as in France. In respect of this 



THE LATER DRAMATISTS 251 

signal precocity, as well as of the sheer power 
of the performance in general, it continues 
to command the wondering interest not only 
of the English but of other peoples, who find 
its vitality as incontestable as its faults. 

The fact that it is centred by one of the 
great geniuses of all literature does not make 
the totality less memorable : indeed, we 
might almost apply to that, as a whole, the 
figure in which Diderot maintained against 
Voltaire the supremacy of Shakespeare : it 
is to the coeval drama of the rest of Europe 
almost as was the rude colossal statue of St. 
Christopher in old Paris to the men around, 
whose stature permitted them to walk be- 
tween its legs. Not till Corneille did French 
drama attain to an approximate intellectual 
vigour ; not till Calderon did that of Spain 
rise to literary greatness ; and neither in the 
too fertile Calderon nor in Corneille is there 
any approach to the wide range of theme 
and treatment attained by the English stage 
before their time. The Elizabethan drama, 
in fine, is the outstanding literary monument 
of its age, and one of the most notable episodes 
in all literary history. 

Later times have made much of their in- 
tellectual sensations ; but it may be left to 
any lover of sheer literature to say whether 
any of these are to be matched with the ex- 
perience of men who in the space of some 
dozen years could go successively to " first 



252 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 

nights " in which they could hear for the 
first time the Hnes of Lorenzo : 

In such a night 
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 
Upon the wild sea banks, and waved her love 
To come again to Carthage ; 

and Hamlet's 

Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon — 

and Macbeth's 

Methought I heard a voice cry " Sleep no more 1 " ; 

and the death-hailing Cleopatra's 

Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have 

Immortal longings in me ; now no more 

The juice of Egypt's grape shall moist this lip ; 

and Perdita's 

Daffodils 
That come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty ; 

and Prospero's mighty period. For us to 
whom such things are radiances from the 
past, there is the consolation of surmising that 
after all no one in that day, probably, de- 
lighted in them quite so much as we can. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 



Chapter I. — General Surveys ] 

The fullest record of English literary history yet produced is the Cambridge 
History of English Literature, now in progress, which is to cover the whole 
field. Ih the volume of Prof. Saintsbury on Elizabethan Literature (Mac- 
millan) there are many just judgments. Of compact surveys, the handbook 
of Thomas Seccombe and J. W. Allen, The Age of Shakespeare (2 vols. : 
(Macmillan is perhaps the most useful to the student. Prof. F. E. Schelling's 
Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642 (Houghton Mifflin, 2 vols., 1911) is a full yet 
concise record. . j 

Chapter II. — ^Prose before Sidney 

In the first vol.'of the rearranged ed. of Prof. Arber's "\EngIish Garner " 
(Dutton, 12 vols.) is a useful collection of Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, 
edited by A. W. Pollard. The early Protestant prose writers are easily to 
be procured second-hand at low prices in the reprints of the Parker Society. 
" Arber's Reprints " (Constable) include the translations of Richard Eden 
on The Newe India (large 4to) ; and the rearranged " Garner " includes 2 
vols, of Voyages and Travels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
Vinson's Arte of Rhetorique is rep. in " Tudor and Stuart Library" (Clar. 
Press.'-IQOQ) ; and Hoby's trans, of the Cortigiano in the " Tudor Transla- 
tions." 

Chapter III. — ^Poetry before Spenser 

TotteVs Miscellany is among " Arber's Reprints." Wyatt's and Surrey's 
Poems., are reprinted in the "Aldine" series (Macmillan). Arber's Swrre^/ 
and Wyatt Anthology and Spenser Anthology give a] general selection. Gas- 
coigne's Works are now well edited by Professor John W. Cunliffe (2 vols.) : 
Camb. Univ. Press). Barnabe Googe's poems are among "Arber's Re- 

Erints " ; and Howell's Devises have been included in the " Tudor and Stuart 
library." 

Chapter IV. — Spenser 

A fully annotated edition of Spenser is one of the great desiderata of Eng- 
lish literary history, but the Globe ed. and that of Smith and De Selincourt 
(Frowde) give good introductions, glossaries, and notes of variant readings. 
Among the best critical essays on Spenser are those of Prof. Mackail (in The 
Springs of Helicon : Longmans, 1909) ; Lowell (in Among my Books, rep. in 
English Poets, " Camelot Classics "), and Minto (in Characteristics of English 
Poets : Ginn) . 

Chapter V.— Prb-Shakespearean Drama 

Prof. A. W. Ward's History of English Dramatic Literature to the Death of 
Queen Anne) revised ed., 3 vols., 1899 : Macmillan) is the standard treatise 
of the kind. The volumes on English Miracle Plays by A. W. Pollard (1890) 
and on Early English Classical Tragedies, by Prof. J. W. Cunliffe (1912 : 
both Clar. Press), give good texts and introductions. 

Apart from the various collected editions of Lilly, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene, 
and Peele, a number of single plays by these authors are produced in the 
" Temple " series, as are Selimus, Arden of Feversham, and Edward III. 
Others are reprinted by the Malone Society. Of the " Shakespeare Apocry- 
pha " — the plays ascribed falsely, or on the score of portions, to Shake- 
speare—the best [collection is that edited by C. F. Tucker-Brooke (Clar. 



254 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 



Press, 1908) with introduction, notes and bibliography. As to the author- 
ship of Arden of Feveraham, see Mr. Charles Crawford's Collectanea, 1st 
Series (Stratford, 1906). 

Chapter VI. — ^The Great Prose 

Sidney' 3 'Apologie for Poetrie and the Fight of the Revenge are among 
Arber's cheap reprints : the Acadia is included in the " Cambridge; English 
Classics " series. Of Florio's jMontaigne there are reprints by Routledge 
and Dent : of Holland's trans, of Plutarch's Moralia^ a selection in one vol. 
is included in the " Everyman's Library." Nashe is admirably edited by 
Mr. McKerrow (4 vols. : Bullen). 

Chapter VII. — Poetry after Spenser 

Cheap reprints of Daniel and Drayton are lacking ; but Daniel is edited 
in 5 vols, by Grosart (1885-86). Drayton's Polyolbion and Harmony of the 
Church were reprinted in 1876 (3 vols. : Russell Smith), and other poems, 
by Collier, in 1856. Prof. O. Elton's monograph on Drayton (1905) is ex- 
cellent. The sonnets of Drayton and Daniel, and the other collections of 
the period, are included in Arber's "English Garner" (12 vols. : Dutton). 
Chapman's Minor Poems fill one vol. of the three-vol. ed. by Shepherd. 
Campion is best edited by Mr. Bullen, who has also made charming collec- 
tions from the Elizabethan song-books. 

Chapter VIII. — Shakespeare 

The Globe editions and that of Craig (Frowde) supply careful texts'; and 
the " Arden " edition (Heath) presents a full apparatus criticua for each of 
the plays singly. In the matter of aesthetic criticism, the student may use- 
fully start with Coleridge's Lectures (Dutton) and Lamb's essay On Shake- 
speare's Tragedies, and go on to Prof. A. C. Bradley's Shakespearean Trag- 
edy (Macmillan) — the finest !work ever done in that field. The best short 
monograph is that of Prof. Sir Walter Raleigh ("Men of Letters" series). 
Sirs Sidney Lee's Life most fully covers the ground ; but that by the late 
F. G. Fleay, as also that writer's Shakespeare Manual, should be studied by 
those concerned to know the history of the plays. 

Chapter IX. — Prose Fiction 

Euphuea is available in Arber's reprint : Greene's works are collected only 
in the 14-vol. edition of Grosart. But Menaphon is included in Arber's 
"English Scholar's Library"; Pandosto in Hazlitt's "Shakespeare Li- 
brary " ; and the Groatsworth of Wit in the New Sh. Soc. " Shakespeare 
Allusion Books," Pt. I., 1874. Lodge's Works have been collected only in 
the scarce and expensive Hunterian Society rep., edited by Dr. Gosse ; but 
Rosalynde is in Hazlitt's " Shakespeare Library," and in the " Shakespeare 
Classics" series (Chatto). Forbomus and Prisceria is in one of the old Sh. 
Soc. vols, of reprints, with other items. Deloney's Works are edited in one 
vol. by Mr. F. O. Mann. (Clar. Press). 

Chapter X. — ^The Later Dramatists 

Most of these are easily procurable in various editions ; and select plays 
from most are included in the " Mermaid " series. 



INDEX 



Addison, 8, 10 

^neid, translations of, 50 sq. 
Apius and Virginia, 87 
Arden of Faversham, 100 
Aretino, 46 
Ariosto, 73, 76, 140 
Aristotle, 138, 139 
Ascham, 24, 36 sq., 61 
Augustan period, 10, 163 

Bacon, 11, 16, 20, 74, 117, 128 sq. 

Baldwin, 60 

Bale, 85 

Barclay, 11, 12 

Barnes, 143 

Barnfield, 144 

Beaumont, 169 

— and Fletcher, 243 sq., 249 
Berners, 11, 32 sq. 

Bible, translations of, 30 sq. 

Blank verse, 51, 68, 89, 197, 247 

Boccaccio, 58, 204 

Bodin 129 

Browne, Sir T., 10, 127 

— W.,153 

Calvin, 119 

Campion, 170 sq. 

Casaubon, 33 

Caxton, 19 

Chapman, 9, 160, 161 sq., 193, 232, 

238 sg'., 245, 247 
Chaucer, 12. 13, 23, 44, 65, 201 sq. 
Cheke, 34s2.,40, 41 
Chettle, 106,170 
Cicero, 21 

Coleridge, 8, 150, 153 
Colet, 20 
Columbus, 20 
Comines, 156 sq. 
Conrad, 199 
Constable, 143, 145 
Coventry Mysteries, 42, 43 
Ooverdale, 21, 31 

Danett, 136 sq. 

Daniel, 61, 95, 143 sq., 153 sq. 

Dante, 76 

Darwin, 7 

Davies, 146, 150 sq. 

Dekker, 113, 170, 181, 223, 231 sq. 

Deloney, 221 sq. 

DeMomay, 119 

Douglas, 50, 53 sq. 



Drama, early Tudor, 15, 93 

— French, 90 sq. 

— pre-Shakespearean, 85 sq. 

— post-Shakespearean, 224 sq. 
Drayton, 40, 61, 82, 83, 111, 112, 

117, 144 52., 153 «2., 181 
Dryden, 10 
Du Bellay, 68 

Eden, 28 sq. 
Edward 1 1 1., 105 
Edwards, 86 
Elyot, 21 
Erasmus, 20, 21 
Euphuism, 33, 37 sq. 

Fairfax, 140 sq. 
Fenton, 136 
Fiction, 18, 19, 200 sq. 
Fleay, 193 
Fiemtng, 55 
Fletcher, G., 143 

— J., 169, 244, 246, 247, 248 
Florio, 136, 138 sg. 

Ford, 245 
Fortescue, 19 
Fox, 27 sq. 

Gamier, 92, 95 

Gascoigne, 6^ ^2- 70,89, 174, 205 sq. 

Gilbert, 17 

Golding, 56. 119 

Googe, 56 52. 

Gosson, 86, 120, 122 

Greene, 37, 79, 96 52-, 17?, 182 sq., 

185 216 52- 
Griffin, 144 
Grtmald, 55 
Guevara, 32 52-, 36, 121 

Hackett, 94 

Hall, Bishop, 174 sq. 

— Edward, 24 52. 
Hardy, 91 
Harington, 140 52. 
Harriott, 17, 18 
Harvey, 17, 69 
Hawes, 11, 12-14 
Heliodorus, 118, 210 
Herrick, 142 

Hey wood, John, 11 

— Thomas, 170, 234, 237 sq., 244 
Hoby, 34 52- 

Hoccleve, 12 



255 



256 



INDEX 



Holland, p., 136 52. 
Homer, 77, 164 sq. 
Hooker, 11, 128 sq. 
Howell, 65 sq. 
Hughes, 52, 89 

Italian poetry, 46 sq. 

Jodelle, 91 

Jonson, 11, 135, 155, 160 sq., 166, 
170, 176, 224 sg., 240, 243 

Keats, 8, 9 

Kyd, 95, 96 sq., 177 

Lamb, 198 

Latimer, 24 

Lilly, 24, 37 sq., 95, 97 sq., 117 sq., 

168, 206 «g. 
Lodge, 108 sq., 122, 143, 145, 166 sq., 

174, 211 sq. 
Luther, 20 
Lydgate, 12, 14, 58 

Malory, 19 

Markham, 123 

Marlowe, 11, 15, 78, 101 sq., 159 sq., 

176, 177, 224 
Marot, 68, 71 

Marston, 174 sq., 229, 231, 232, 241 
Massinger, 243, 245, 246, 247 
Middleton, 181 
Milton, 77, 82, 249 
Mirrour for Magistrates, 58 sq., 167 
Montaigne, 121, 131, 138 sq. 
More, Sir T., 16, 20, 21, 22, 26, 59, 

129 
Munday, 170, 181 

Nashe, 55, 106, 126 sq.^ 168, 219 sq. 
iJorth, 32 sq. * 

Nut'Brovon Maid, The, 12, 42 sq. 

Painter, 203 sq. 

I*6Cock 19 

Peele, 79,96 «g., 168, 181 

Percy, W., 144 

Petrarch, 68 

Plato, 21 

Plutarch, 136 «g. 

Polydore Vergil, 26 

Pope, 8, 9 

Porter, 246 

Prose, art of, 20 sq., 117 sq. 



Raleigh, 123 5?., 137 
Eeformation, efEecta of, 20, 22, 27, 

115 
Return from Parnassus, The, 227 
Rogers, 31 
RoUe, 23 
Eosseter, 170 sq. 
Roye, 174 

Sackville, 11, 52 sq., 57 sq., 61, 68 

Sandys, 22 

Science, 18 

Selimus, 105 

Seneca, 57, 89 

Shakespeare, 11, 40, 144, 147 sq., 

159, 16v. sq., 175 sq., 217, 227, 229, 

240, 245, 252 
Shirley, 2*2, 249 — % 

Sidney, 83, 84, 96, 97, 117, 118 sq., 

143 sq., 208 sq. 
Skelton, 11, 174 
Smith, W., 144 
Songs, l&l sq. 
Sonnets, 143 sq, 

Sp nser, 11, 66 sq., 117, 140 sq., 156 
Stanyhurst, 55 

Sternhold and Hopkins, 43 sq., 47 
Still, 86 

Surrey, 11, 12, 44 sq., 168, 247 
Swift, 10 

Tasso, 73, 76, 140 

Taylor, Jeremy, 10 

Tottel's Miscellany, 12, 42 sq., 62 

Toumeur, 245 

Tragedy, decUne of, 242 sq. 

Twine, 55 

Tyndale, 19, 20, 21, 22 

Udall, 86 
Underdowne, 118, 136 

Vander Noodt, 68 
Vaux, 52 sq. 

Walton, 227 
Watson, 143 
Webster, 181, 241, 245 
Whetstone, 65, 97 
Wilkins, 236 
Wilmot, 89 
Wilson, 41 

Wordsworth, 8, 153. 155 
Wyatt, 11-14, 44 sq., 168 
TVynkyn de Worde, 19 



The Home University 

LlbrarV O/^ Modem Knowledge 

Is made up of absolutely new books by leading authorities. 

The editors are Professors Gilbert Murray^, H. A, L. Fisher, 
W. T. Brewster, and J. Arthur Thomson. 

Cloth bound, good paper, clear type, 256 pages per volume, 
bibliographies, indices, also maps or illustrations where 
needed. Each complete and sold separately. 



50 



C. 



per 
volume 



AMERICAN HISTORY 



[Order 

Number^ 

47. The Colonial Period (1607-1766). 

By Charles McLean Andrews, Professor of American History, Yale. 
The fascinating history of the two hundred years of "colonial times." 

82. The Wars Between England and America 
(1763-1815). 

By Theodore C. Smith, Professor of American History, Williams 
College. A history of the period, with especial emphasis on The 
Revolution and The War of 1812. 

67. From Jefferson to Lincoln (1815-1860). 

By William MacDonald, Professor of History, Brown University. 
The author makes the historjr of this period circulate about constitu- 
tional ideas and slavery sentiment. 

25. The Civil War (1854-1865). 

By Frederic L. Paxson, Professor of American History, University 
of Wisconsin. 

39. Reconstruction and Union (1865-1912). 

By Paul Leland Haworth. A History of the United States in our 
own times. 



GENERAL HISTORY AND GEOGRAPHY 

78. Latin America. 

By William R. Shepherd, Professor of History, Columbia. With 
maps. Sets forth the kind of equipment and the historical, artistic, 
and commercial development of the Central and South American 
republics. 

76. The Ocean. A General Account of the Sci- 
ence of the Sea. 

By Sir John Murray, K. C. B., Naturalist H. M. S. "Challenger," 
1872-1876, joint author of The Depths of the Ocean, etc. With 
plates and maps in colors. The author, orie of the greatest authc^ri- 
ties on the Ocean, tells the results of his life-long study of the seas. 

72. Germany of To-day. 

By Charles Tower. Describes the constitution and government of 
the Empire and its several States, city administration and enterprise, 
educational institutions, the organization of industry and agricul- 
ture, and the outstanding features of social and intellectual activity. 

57. Napoleon. 

By Herbert Fisher, Vice-Chancellor of SheiSeld University. Author 
of The Republican Tradition in Europe, etc. Mr. Fisher presents at 
once a vivid portrait of the "greatest conqueror and captain of mod- 
ern times," and an important historical estimate of the period. 

26. The Dawn of History. 

By J. L. Myres, Professor of Ancient History, Oxford. The first 
brief and simple survey of the history of very early times. 

30. Rome. 

By W. Warde Fowler, author of Social Life at Rome, etc. "An 
accurate, scholarly, and unusually entertaining history from the ear- 
liest authentic records to the death of Marcus Aurelius." — American 
Library Association Booklist, 

84. The Growth of Europe. 

By Granville Cole, Professor of Geology, Royal College of Science, 
Ireland. A study of the geology and physical geography in connec- 
tion with the political geography. 

13. Medieval Europe. 

By H. W. C. Davis, Fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, author of 

Charlemagne, etc. 

33. The History of England. 

By A. F. Pollard, Professor of English History, University of 
London. "Professor Pollard is to be ranked among the few leading 
English historians of the times. One of the most brilliant little vol- 
umes." — Springfield Republican. 

3. The French Revolution. 

By Hilaire Belloc. "For the busy man it would be difficult to 
name another work better suited for the purpose of conveying an 
intelligent idea of the greatest political event of modern times." — 
San Francisco Chronicle. 



4. A Short History of War and Peace. 

By G. H. Perris, author of Russia in Revolution, etc. The Hon. 
James Bryce writes: "I have read it with much interest and pleas- 
ure, admiring the skill with which you have managed to compress so 
many facts and views into so small a volume." 

20. History of Our Time (1885-1911). 

By G. P. GoocH. A "moving picture" of the world since 1885. 

22. The Papacy and Modern Times. 

By Rev. William Barry, D. D., author of The Papal Monarchy, 
etc. The story of the rise and fall of the Temporal Power. 

8. Polar Exploration. 

By Dr. W. S. Bruce, Leader of the "Scotia" expedition. Empha- 
sizes the results of the expeditions, not in miles traveled, but in 
valuable information brought home. "Of enormous interest." — 
Chataiiqua Press. 

18. The Opening-up of Africa. 

By Sir H. H. Johnston. The first living authority on the subject 
tells how and why the "native races" went to the various parts of 
Africa and summarizes its exploration and colonization. (With 
maps.) 

19. The Civilization of China. 

By H. A. Giles, Professor of Chinese, Cambridge, author of A His- 
tory of Chinese Literature, etc. A vivid outline of history, manners 
and customs, art, literature, and religion. 

36. Peoples and Problems of India. 

By Sir T. W. Holderness, Secretary of the Revenue, Statistics, and 
Commerce Department of the British India Office. "The best small 
treatise dealing with the range of subjects fairly indicated by the 
title." — The Dial. 

7. Modern Geography. 

By Dr. Marion Newbigin. Those to whom "geography" suggests 
"bounded on the north by," etc., will gain a new view of the world 
from this book. It shows the relation of physical features to living 
things and to some of the chief institutions of civilization. 

51. Master Mariners. 

By John R. Spears, author of The History of Our Navy, etc. A 
history of sea craft and sea adventure from the earliest times, with 
an account of sea customs and the great seamen. 

SOCIAL SCIENCE 

77. Co-Partnership and Profit Sharing. 

By Aneurin Williams, Chairman, Executive Committee, Interna- 
tional Co-operative Alliance, etc. Explains the various types of co- 
partnership or profit-sharing, or both, and gives details of the ar- 
rangements now in force in many of the great industries both here 
and abroad. 

75. Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle. 

By H. N. Brailsford, author of "Adventures in Prose," etc. A his- 
tory of the immediate influence of the French Revolution in England 



79. Unemployment. 

By A. C. PiGou, M. A., Professor of Political Economy at Cam- 
bridge. The meaning, measurement, distribution, and effects of un- 
employment, its relation to wages, trade fluctuations, and disputes, 
and some proposals of remedy or relief. 

80. Common-Sense in Law. 

By Prof. Paul Vinogradoff, D. C. L., LL. D. Social and Legal 
Rules — Legal Rights and Duties — Facts and Acts in Law — Legislation 
— Custom — Judicial Precedents — Equity — The Law of Nature. 

49. Elements of Political Economy. 

By S. J. Chapman, Professor of Political Economy and Dean of 
Faculty of Commerce and Administration, University of Manchester. 
A clear statement of the theory of the subject for non-expert readers. 

11. The Science of Wealth. 

By J. A. HoBSON, author of Problems of Poverty. A study of the 
structure and working of the modern business world. 

1. Parliament. Its History, Constitution, and 
Practice. 

By Sir Courtenay P. Ilbert, Clerk of the House of Commons. 
"Can be praised without reserve. Admirably clear." — New York Sun. 

16. Liberalism. 

By Prof. L. T. Hobhouse, author of Democracy and Reaction. A 
masterly philosophical and historical review of the subject. 

5. The Stock Exchange. 

By F. W. Hirst, Editor of the London Economist. Reveals to the 
non-financial mind the facts about investment, speculation, and the 
other terms which the title suggests. 

10. The Socialist Movement. 

By J. Ramsay Macdonald, Chairman of the British Labor Party. 
"The latest authoritative exposition of Socialism." — San Francisco 
Argonaut. 

28. The Evolution of Industry. 

By D, H. MacGregor, Professor of Political Economy, University 
of Leeds. An outline of the recent changes that have given us the 
present conditions of the working classes and the principles involved. 

29. Elements of English Law. 

By W. M. Geldart, Vinerian Professor of English Law, Oxford. A 
simple statement of the basic principles of the English legal system 
on which that of the United States is based. 

32. The School: An Introduction to the Study of 
Education. 

By J. J. FiNDLAY, Professor of Education, Manchester. Presents 
the history, the psychological basis, and the theory of the school with 
a rare power of summary and suggestion. 

6. Irish Nationality. 

By Mrs. J. R. Green. A brilliant account of the genius and mission 
of the Irish people. "An entrancing work, and I would advise every 
one with a drop of Irish blood in his veins or a vein of Irish sym- 
pathy in his heart to read it." — New York Times' Review. 



NATURAL SCIENCE 
68. Disease and Its Causes. 

By W. T. Councilman, M. D., LL. D., Professor of Pathology, Har- 
vard University. 

85. Sex. 

By J. Arthur Thomson and Patrick Geddes, joint authors of The 
Evolution of Sex. 

71. Plant Life. 

By J. B. Farmer, D. Sc, F. R. S., Professor of Botany in the Impe- 
rial College of Science. This very fully illustrated volume contains 
an account of the salient features of plant form from the point of 
view of function. 

63. The Origin and Nature of Life. 

By Benjamin M. Moore, Professor of Bio-Chemistry, Liverpool. 
Perhaps the chapters on "The Origin of Life" and "How Life Came 
to Earth" will attract most attention, as throwing the newest light 
upon matters of very ancient controversy. 

53. Electricity. 

By GisBERT Kapp, Professor of Electrical Engineering, University of 
Birmingham. 

54. The Making of the Earth. 

By J. W. Gregory, Professor of Geology, Glasgow University. 38 
maps and figures. Describes the origin of the earth, the formation 
and changes of its surface and structure, its geological history, the 
first appearance of life, and its influence upon the globe. 

56. Man: A History of the Human Body. 

By A. Keith, M. D., Hunterian Professor, Royal College of Sur- 
geons. Shows how the human body developed. 

74. Nerves. 

By David Eraser Harris, M. D., Professor of Physiology, Dalhousie 
University, Halifax. Explains in non-technical language the place 
and powers of the nervous system, more particularly of those regions 
of the system whose activities are not associated with the rousing of 
consciousness. 

21. An Introduction to Science. 

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, Science Editor of the Home Univer- 
sity Library. For those unacquainted with the scientific volumes in 
the series, this would prove an excellent introduction. 

14. Evolution. 

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson and Prof. Patrick Geddes. Explains 
to the layman what the title means to the scientific world. 

23. Astronomy. 

By A. R. HiNKS, Chief Assistant at the Cambridge Observatory. 
"Decidedly original in substance, and the most readable and informa- 
tive little book on modern astronomy we have seen for a long time." 

— Nature. 

24. Psychical Research. 

By Prof. W. F. Barrett, formerly President of the Society for 
Psychical Research. A strictly scientific examination. 



9. The Evolution of Plants. 

By Dr. D. H. Scott, President of the Linnean Society of London. 
The story of the development of flowering plants, from the earliest 
zoological times, unlocked from technical language. 

43. Matter and Energy. 

By F. SoDDY, Lecturer in Physical Chemistry and Radioactivity, 
University of Glasgow. "Brilliant. Can hardly be surpassed. Sure 
to attract attention." — New York Sun. 

41. Psychology, The Study of Behaviour. 

By William McDougall, of Oxford. A well digested summary of 
the essentials of the science put in excellent literary form by a lead- 
ing authority. 

42. The Principles of Physiology. 

By Prof. J. G. McKendrick. A compact statement by the Emeritus 

Professor at Glasgow, for uninstructed readers. 

37. Anthropology. 

By R. R. Marett, Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford. Seeks to 
plot out and sum up the general series of changes, bodily and mental, 
undergone by man in the course of history. "Excellent. So enthusi- 
astic, so clear and witty, and so well adapted to the general reader." 
— American Library Association Booklist. 

17. Crime and Insanity. 

By Dr. C. A. Mercier, author of Text-Book of Insanity, etc. 

12. The Animal World. 

By Prof. F. W. Gamble. 

15. Introduction to Mathematics. 

By A. N. Whitehead, author of Universal Algebra. 

PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

69. A History of Freedom of Thought. 

By John B. Bury, M. A., LL. D., Regius Professor of Modern His- 
tory in Cambridge University. Summarizes the history of the long 
struggle between authority and reason and of the emergence of the 
principle that coercion of opinion is a mistake. 

55. Missions : Their Rise and Development. 

By Mrs. Mandell Creighton, author of History of England. The 
author seeks to prove that missions have done more to civilize the 
world than any other human agency. 

52. Ethics. 

By G. E. MooRE, Lecturer in Moral Science, Cambridge. Discusses 
what is right and what is wrong, and the whys and wherefores. 

65. The Literature of the Old Testament. 

By George F. Moore, Professor of the History of Religion, Harvard 
University. "A popular work of the highest order. Will be profit- 
able to anybody who cares enough about Bible study to read a serious 
book on the subject." — American Journal of Theology, 

50. The Making of the New Testament. 

By B. W. Bacon, Professor of New Testament Criticism, Yale. An 
authoritative summary of the results of modern critical research 
with regard to the origins of the New Testament. 



35. The Problems of Philosophy. 

By Bertrand Russell, Lecturer and Late Fellow, Trinity College, 

Cambridge. 

44. Buddhism. 

By Mrs. Rhys Davids, Lecturer on Indian Philosopliy, Manchester. 
A review of that religion and body of culture which is to a large 
part of the human race, chiefly situated in Southern Asia, what 
Christianity is to us of the West. 

46. English Sects: A History of Nonconformity. 

By W. B. Selbie, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford. 

60. Comparative Religion. 

By Prof. J. Estlin Carpenter. "One of the few authorities on this 
subject compares all the religions to see what they have to offer on 
the great themes of religion." — Christian Work and Evangelist. 

LITERATURE AND ART 
73. Euripides and His Age. 

By Gilbert Murray, Regius Professor of Greek, Oxford. Brings 
before the reader an undisputedly great poet and thinker, an amaz- 
ingly successful playwright, and a figure of high significance in the 
history of humanity. 

81. Chaucer and His Times. 

By Grace E. Hadow, Lecturer Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; Late 
Reader, Bryn Mawr. 

70. Ancient Art and Ritual. 

By Jane E. Harrison, LL. D., D. Litt. "One of the 100 most impor- 
tant books of 1913." — Nezv York Times Review. 

61. The Victorian Age in Literature. 

By G. K. Chesterton. The most powerfully sustained and brilliant 
piece of writing Mr. Chesterton has yet published. 

59. Dr. Johnson and His Circle. 

By John Bailey. Johnson's life, character, works, and friendships 
are surveyed; and there is a notable vindication of the "Genius of 
Boswell." 

58. The Newspaper. 

By G. Binney Dibblee. The first full account, from the inside, of 
newspaper organization as its exists to-day. 

62. Painters and Painting. 

By Sir Frederick Wedmore. With 16 half-tone illustrations. 

64. The Literature of Germany. 

By J. G. Robertson. 

48. Great Writers of America. 

By W. P. Trent and John Erskine, of Columbia University. Gives 
the essential facts as to the lives and works of Franklin, Washington 
Irving, Bryant, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, and the other 
Transcendentalists, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the other New Eng- 
land poets, Motley and the other historians, Webster and Abraham 
Lincoln, Mrs. Stowe, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, and Mark Twain. 



40. The English Language. 

By L. P. Smith. A concise history of the origin and development 
of the English language. "Has certainly rnanaged to include a vast 
amount of information, and, while his writing is clear and lucid, he 
is always in touch with life." — The Athenaeum. 

45. Medieval English Literature. 

By W. P. Ker, Professor of English Literature, University College, 
London. "One of the soundest scholars. His style is effective, sim- 
ple, yet never dry." — The Athenaeum. 

27. Modern English Literature. 

By G. H. Mair. From Wyatt and Surrey to Synge and Yeats. *'A 
most suggestive book, one of the best of this great series." — Chicago 
Evening Post. 

2. Shakespeare. 

By John Masefield. "One of the very few indispensable adjuncts 
to a Shakespearean Library." — Boston Transcript. 

31. Landmarks in French Literature. 

By G. L. Strachey, Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. "For a 
survey of the oustanding figures of French literature with an acute 
analysis of the contribution which each made to his time and to the 
general mass there has been no book as yet published so judicially 
interesting." — The Chautauquan. 

38. Architecture. 

By Prof. W. R. Lethaby. An introduction to the history and 
theory of the art of building. "Professor Lethaby's scholarship and 
extraordinary knowledge of the most recent discoveries of archaeo- 
logical research provide the reader with a new outlook and with new 
facts." — The Athenaeum. 

66. Writing English Prose. 

By William T. Brewster, Professor of English, Columbia Univer- 
sity. "Should be put into the hands of every man who is beginning 
to write and of every teacher of English that has brains enough to 
understand sense." — New York Sun. 

83. William Morris: His Work and Influence. 

By A. Clutton Brock, author of Shelley: The Man and the Poet. 
William Morris believed that the artist should toil for love of his 
work rather than the gain of his emjjloyer, and so he turned from 
making works of art to remaking society. 

OTHER VOLUMES IN PREPARATION. 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
34 West 33d Street New York 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Jan. 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 






V■i^-^;!j;/;!if;y:;?^;'//v^j;:^^1&•:■S:|■^! 



'.'.'•'..•' 'i. ;.-i7('t;«Sr;')i ijJi)i."i't,'' .''?T;>.'i,tri;«f<"'i,:»V. 



.■,■,.;■■,:?::!<. .■•;;--;T;f!;::n;.^;«,-wr,i ■■^-- -"' 



LIBKAKY ur ov_;iNv:>ni_oo 




